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Writing well in college is a real challenge. Many students rely on their writing skills to meet the commitments required by university text production. Fortunately, pedagogical accompaniment plays an important role when you learn about academic writing. 

I was the best in language in my school, so why do you think I should learn to write now in my undergraduate degree? This question, bordering on naive, contains an input error: writing formats vary and have their own demands.

Here we will address seven recommendations for you to achieve texts that meet the demands of the academy. Your domain will be part not only of the advances in your studies, but of the professional success that will accompany you during the performance of your career.

The challenge of writing well in college

Criticism of the quality of writing by incoming college students is commonplace. However, many of the keys to writing well are found in the support provided by your teachers.

Academic writing implies the appropriation of styles, models, norms and formalities of the medium. Just as the oral expression of a professional is filled with specific codes, the same happens with the written one.

During higher education you will become familiar with a professional language that will be your own. You will integrate it into your personal structure and you will use it properly. Parallel to such a process, your way of writing will mature.

The technical language and the level of depth of the contents increase notably. Hence, the writing skills and abilities that you brought from high school may not be enough.

Why is it important to master academic writing?

The type of discipline developed in the university marks the mastery of professional knowledge. Put another way, a graduate expresses in words how much he knows about his specialty area.

Spoken and written language visibly manifests the expertise you gain as you progress through your career. The academic environment will demand that you use the specific vocabulary of your profession properly and that you do so effectively.

The pedagogical accompaniment during the processes of appropriation of the professional language improves the academic performance.

When you follow the recommendations that mark the academic accompaniment on writing, you can achieve success in your studies. Writing well in college involves a systematic process that meets all demands.

What you learn, discover, question or propose has to meet logical, formal and content requirements. On the other hand, rigor and honesty are an organic part of the production of academic texts.

Infallible tips to write well in college

Writing well in college is a real challenge. Many students rely on their writing skills to meet the commitments required by university text production. Fortunately, pedagogical accompaniment plays an important role when you learn about academic writing. 

I was the best in language in my school, so why do you think I should learn to write now in my undergraduate degree? This question, bordering on naive, contains an input error: writing formats vary and have their own demands.

Here we will address seven recommendations for you to achieve texts that meet the demands of the academy. Your domain will be part not only of the advances in your studies, but of the professional success that will accompany you during the performance of your career.

The challenge of writing well in college

Criticism of the quality of writing by incoming college students is commonplace. However, many of the keys to writing well are found in the support provided by your teachers.

Academic writing implies the appropriation of styles, models, norms and formalities of the medium. Just as the oral expression of a professional is filled with specific codes, the same happens with the written one.

During higher education you will become familiar with a professional language that will be your own. You will integrate it into your personal structure and you will use it properly. Parallel to such a process, your way of writing will mature.

The technical language and the level of depth of the contents increase notably. Hence, the writing skills and abilities that you brought from high school may not be enough.

Why is it important to master academic writing?

The type of discipline developed in the university marks the mastery of professional knowledge. Put another way, a graduate expresses in words how much he knows about his specialty area.

Spoken and written language visibly manifests the expertise you gain as you progress through your career. The academic environment will demand that you use the specific vocabulary of your profession properly and that you do so effectively.

The pedagogical accompaniment during the processes of appropriation of the professional language improves the academic performance.

When you follow the recommendations that mark the academic accompaniment on writing, you can achieve success in your studies. Writing well in college involves a systematic process that meets all demands.

What you learn, discover, question or propose has to meet logical, formal and content requirements. On the other hand, rigor and honesty are an organic part of the production of academic texts.

Infallible tips to write well in college

The important thing in this learning process is that you can apply tips and techniques appropriately. It’s nothing special, because you already have a language structure that you just have to update and focus.

Remember that you are going to write for someone who knows the area very well and who also has expectations about your linguistic expression. Your interlocutor does not expect a display of inspiration, but a rational expression of what you know.

The form and content of what you write constitute a whole that is received by your teacher or evaluator. From this reading you will be able to get an idea of ​​your level of reflection, sharpness of analysis and capacity for abstraction, to mention just a few aspects.

So pay attention to the following tips and put them into practice every time you have to write at the university. To the extent that you consciously integrate them into your writing, you will be able to obtain better results.

1. Be clear about the objective of the task and the type of text

It is necessary to allocate time to think before writing, so you can define the objective of the text to be written. After specifying the objective, the type of text is determined: essay, report, summary, etc.

Ask questions about the objective of the proposed text to reflect on. What are you looking for: explain a process? Empty the results of an observation? Provide an overview on the subject? Analyze a concept or a theory?

In general, in the accompaniment provided by the teacher, writing and text guidelines are set, which makes it easier to write well. The professor can request a report, an essay, a review, a presentation, a monograph, among others.

Your best strategy is to know the format of academic writing that you are asked for and develop it as it is. Follow the instructions of the activity, investigate the characteristics of the type of text requested and apply them.

2. To write well you must always keep the reader in mind

There is a golden rule that you should always keep in mind: you do not write for yourself, but for another person who must understand you clearly. That other can be a specific reader with expectations, like your teacher, or an ideal reader who wants to know the topic.

In academic accompaniment, teachers insist on the original writing that avoids a cut and paste process. Even if it takes more time and you think you don’t have the necessary language, it is preferable that you meet this expectation.

In universities, who will review your text has parameters that you must take care of:

• Originality.
• Methodological rigor.
• specialized language.
• Orthotypographic correction.
• expository clarity.
• Cohesion.
• Coherence.

However, you must develop a rhetorical awareness that materializes in a communicative strategy: you express to your receiver a specific knowledge of the studied area. You address your teacher, be he a chemist, a philosopher or an architect.

3. Balance what you know about the topic and the purpose of the text

No one can write a text on an unknown topic. So the step prior to writing is: reading, researching, documenting, taking notes, making concept maps or diagrams, discussing the topic, etc. Create your own study tools.

In the process, you will find new vocabulary that you must consult in specialized dictionaries to appropriate it. Do not overlook information that you do not know, because you must focus to understand the key concepts.

After informing yourself extensively about the subject, you will proceed to write everything you know using your own words. You must be careful to meet the objective of the text and to effectively incorporate specialized vocabulary.

For example, let us write an essay on a legal topic. These types of writings include Latin phrases that have a legal meaning. To the extent that you use these locutions, you are demonstrating and integrating knowledge.

Keep the following keywords in mind to align your writing with its intent:

• Expose.
• To convince.
• Argue.
• To debate.
• Disassemble.
• Instruct.
• Analyze.
• Assess.

4. Writing well is a process with 3 phases

Consider this: famous writers are always organized, and that’s why they can write their ideas clearly and effectively. Surely you have seen how teachers recommend over and over again that there be an organization prior to writing the texts; and this is the key to learning to write well. 

People who write should do so systematically and in three stages. Improvising leads to the production of poor quality, substandard, obscure and disjointed text. It is convenient to adjust to the following phases:

• Prewriting or planning.
• Writing or development.
• Post-writing or evaluation.
• plan your writing

The first stage is highly despised by those new to academic writing. Usually, they put on paper or screen any idea that comes to mind. Does it look familiar?

Such a practice constitutes a serious error, because it reveals little structure of thought, lack of methodological rigor and underestimation of the act of writing. Do not doubt it: your texts demonstrate your progress in the university career.

If you’ve already studied the subject, then why not invest time in designing your writing? Many students consider it a waste of time. However, you save it because you establish a roadmap for the writing.

Learning to write academic texts well includes a methodology that must be rigorously respected.

An outline or a concept map helps you organize and prioritize the ideas you have on the subject. With these tools you can visualize how the theme will go through and what will be the parts that will make it up.

Writing is the development of what is prefigured in the schema or conceptual map. It implies going writing the ideas in sentences that are organized in paragraphs and these make up the parts, according to the format used.

You must try to write complete ideas that progress within the discourse in a coherent and cohesive manner. This means that the approaches must obey a logical and integrated advance.

Effective writers write and reread every sentence they add. With this strategy you can verify the thematic progression of the discourse and the unity of the structure. We even suggest you reread the entire text from the beginning on multiple occasions.

At this stage, he makes adjustments to the tone used. The key is to display what you know about each subject in a progressive, dosed way, integrating the ideas. These topics are the pillars of your written production.

You also want to keep the balance between the parts. That is to say, that they all have a disposition proportional to their importance or complexity. Developing is displaying in writing and in a systematic way what you learned.

Does the phrase “I wanted to say” sound familiar to you? Let’s assume that this is the statement that the gap between wanting to express and the realization of the text is immense.

Surely your teachers, in the process of learning to write well, emphasize that this last stage is extremely important. It consists of reviewing and evaluating the text to see its adequacy, both in form and content.

A final reading will give you an overview of the partial result of your essay. Unless it is an individual written evaluation, at this point it is recommended that another person read it and make comments.

5. Arm and disarm texts and ideas: writing well takes time

Think of a text as a puzzle with pieces of various shapes, which can also be assembled in various ways. Each structure attends to the ingenuity, knowledge and expertise of the person who designs it.

When you write, you are actually solving a problem raised by someone else. So you investigate, design and build a solution with words, with the elaboration of a speech.

Experts in academic accompaniment agree that there is no single textual solution, but variants in process. So you have the option of the rewrite. In other words, you can modify your writing over and over again.

This is possibly the most difficult part to execute because it involves deleting, discarding, modifying, calibrating, and so on. It may even mean just sticking with the ideas and starting over with a different tone of writing.

Writing well transforms your knowledge of the world

Perhaps you have already wondered why it is necessary to demonstrate in writing what is learned in a subject. The pedagogical answers are many, but let’s favor one: writing expresses your knowledge of the universe.

We are not exaggerating with this statement: the academic accompaniment establishes the writings because they imply a process of maturation of thought structures. Significant cognitive advances can be verified in a text.

If you reread what has been said so far, you will see that the proposed process leads to digesting the knowledge to translate it into words. Whoever receives knowledge is transformed by the impact of the learning achieved.