Description: Every other writing assignment comes with a specified deadline. Check top tips on how to speed up your academic writing today!
Speeding up Your Essay Writing: Simple Steps
Essay writing constitutes a huge portion of the workload your average student has to deal with. It does not matter what discipline you study or what your future career is likely to be, you are going to write essays anyway, and a lot of them. This means that learning how to churn them out quickly without sacrificing their quality is one of the most effective ways to improve your academic performance. The faster you deal with this type of work, the more time and attention you can dedicate to other activities, both academic and non-academic.
So, how can you do it? Let us take a closer look at a few tactics you can start employing right now.
Write an Outline
You may think that by skipping writing an outline, you save time. If so, you are wrong – every minute you spend outlining can save you 5 to 10 minutes of writing, because you do not waste your time repeating yourself, then correcting what you wrote, then introducing something you forgot to mention earlier, then understanding that you have to rewrite a whole portion of your paper because it is a disjointed mess.
Use a Citation Generator
If you write a research paper, you are bound to use sources. Most likely, these sources exist in all kinds of formats: books, printed and online publications, web pages, articles in magazines, and so on. Each individual type of sources has to be quoted in the text and mentioned in the bibliography in a specific way, depending on the formatting style of your paper. And do not forget that academia uses a variety of these styles, each with its own peculiarities and rules. As a result, you are dealing with a confusing mess of regulations, conventions, and rules. If you have to leaf through the style guide to remind yourself how to quote each individual source, it can significantly increase the amount of time spent writing the paper.
Enter citation generators – these online tools eliminate all this hassle. Simply enter the relevant information on a source, specify the style you use, and they automatically create an entry you can use in your bibliography.
Hire Somebody to Edit and Proofread Your Writing
Editing and proofreading, when done properly, can significantly improve the quality of your paper and increase your chances of getting a good grade for it. However, if you want editing and proofreading to have any significant effect, you have to spend quite a bit of time on them. A perfunctory effort will be of little consequence. In addition, when you edit and proofread your own writing, you are more likely to miss mistakes, typos, and other flaws – after all, you are the author, and it is difficult for you to see your own text from an unbiased perspective. In other words, when you revise your own essays, you are by definition less effective than a professional editor. Therefore, if you hire somebody to help you with this work, not only do you save time, but increase the overall quality of your writing as well. Looking for a specialist also does not take a lot of time – you simply contact one of the online services offering this kind of assistance and say, “Please, edit my essay online”.
Write Introduction and Conclusion Last
Most students write the parts of their papers in the order in which they follow each other: introduction, body paragraphs, and conclusion. It is not a very efficient way to do things. If you start with an introduction, you spend more time writing it because you effectively introduce something that does not exist yet. Moreover, after you finish writing the essay, you will most likely have to rewrite or alter the introduction, because it will no longer work in combination with the rest of the essay. The same goes for the conclusion – write it last of all when you already know what your paper is about.
Create a Proper Writing Environment
It does not matter what tricks you use to speed up your writing – if you cannot focus on your work, they are not going to do you much good. And when it comes to achieving optimal focus, the best way to tackle the problem is to create an environment that helps you concentrate on your job instead of distracting from it. To do so, you should:
- Go somewhere where people will be unlikely to distract you. Instead of your dorm room where somebody regularly drops by for a chat, go to a distant part of the college library or a café where you do not usually hang out. It is easier to hide from those who distract you than to say, “Please do not bother me, I am writing my essay“ every five minutes;
- Eliminate digital distractions. Do not fight the temptation of surfing the Internet, checking out social media statuses, or texting your friends. Instead, make it difficult to engage in these activities. Block distracting websites and apps using tools like RescueTime or Freedom. Turn off your smartphone. If you do not need Internet access for research, switch off your router altogether;
- Gather what you need. Make sure you have all your writing equipment, sources, snacks, water bottle, and such like before you sit down to write. This way you will not have to get up to get something every now and then.
Go for Quality over Quantity
Make it your goal to make your every word count. The less you write, the less time it is going to take. Instead of first writing haphazardly and then cutting away unnecessary words, sentences, and paragraphs, aim at expressing your thoughts in as few words as possible from the very beginning. Increasing your word count will not make your essay better by itself – your every word should bring value to your writing, and you do not need to write a long essay to receive an “A”.
One does not have to spend hours upon hours working on an assignment to get a good grade for it – and we hope that these tips will show you how you can achieve excellent results and still have time for something other than writing.
