How to improve academic writing of first-years?
The Best Tips For Successful Academic Writing For The First-Year Of University
The very first impression of getting to the university is the feeling of the unknown. And academic writing is one of the components of this big, scary “Unknown,” which is pretty common for many students. The necessity of learning more about academic writing is driven by the fact that nearly every single paper in the university has special requirements.
It is hard for students to understand the most basic rules of academic writing. The main issue is that they are given a huge bunch of different sources. As a result, they have enough theoretical knowledge but no ideas about how to implement this knowledge into a paper.
Tutors also face issues in this situation. When they have to deal with novice students, they face the problem when no one understands the complexity and importance of academic writing, and the explanations become hard.
For this reason, we decided to provide you with the best ways to improve the academic writing of your students.
Reading Can Save Writing
When you read a lot, you can write much easier. That is obvious, and that is pretty simple for many people. However, the development of writing skills depends on reading skill, so both of them should be improved by the student. The tips are pretty simple:
- Provide the technique of source searching. When using a library, you should show them how to find the proper source for their needs and tell them more about taking notes, searching for proper information, and making references.
- Give more information to search for creating a good training exercise.
- Build a communication bridge to improve the skills of your students. Give them more pieces of advice and show options to simplify their overall work.
- Keep training your students and provide them with regular tasks to give them more feedback about their work.
- Create a discussion and show fair criticism.
- Show examples of successful academic research and give more explanations of how different ideas are implemented.
Communication and feedback are important for students. All the mistakes they can make while studying must be shown and fixed, so they would get more experience and more native help for their further education.
Time-Management Skills
One of the most important issues for many students is the lack of time. Especially when they want to have some rest, they do not want to spend hours analyzing different articles. Even more, they can barely understand the literature they examine when they only learn more about academic writing. For this reason, your task is to help them with simple steps:
- Teach them to ask questions. While they are reading some articles, the important task for them is to ask questions and find answers. For example, by giving a sample of the questions, they have to find answers to a great idea, which will help students spend less time analyzing different pieces of research.
- Give enough motivation to students. Provide them with more simplified literature, which will help them train themselves with analysis.
- Teach students to separate all the papers they read into smaller pieces, which will help them in further analysis.
Time management is important, and many students do not have this skill developed. Spending some time showing them successful examples will be a perfect deal.
Critical Thinking While Researching
Critical thinking while researching is important when you are working with academic writing. Provide your students with knowledge of how to dive a little deeper. By providing simple examples, you will be able to show them how to provide great criticism without different personal judgments.
Quotation Is Important
When students learn about writing academic articles, they face quotations, which seem like a great helper, when they do not know what to write about. However, these issues can cost them a lot, so one of your main tasks is to show them the whole importance of this issue.
- Provide students with different ways of referencing, claiming the advantages of each. Show them why using references should be balanced.
- Show your students options to quote or paraphrase the text they are analyzing.
- Give more information about highlighting the key points of the paper they refer to and show the best ways to implement the information they got while the analysis.
Quotations are important, but by giving even simple examples of their use, you can remove the issue and simplify everything for your students.
Is Academic Writing Challenging?
Teaching newcomers academic writing might be a real pain. When students come to the university with basic knowledge of writing essays, giving them information about academic writing is a real challenge.
But by finding a correct approach, you will be able to reduce the stress for all sides of the education process. You will have to spend less time explaining simple writing mechanics. At the same time, students will find more motivation to improve their writing skills.