4 Assignment Writing Tips for College Students

Writing a good assignment is something that a lot of college students can struggle with. If you’re one of those students, read this post till the end. We will be sharing some valuable tips that you can act on to make sure that the next assignment you write comes out way past your expectations.

1. Don’t Stick to One Source When Doing Your Research

The first step in writing any assignment is research, so that is what our first tip is going to be about.

When conducting research, you can come across a source that has all the information you need and all the references that you want to include in your assignment. Although it can be tempting to just take all your information from that one place, it’s not advisable.

Here’s why.

When you stick to a single source when conducting your research, you unknowingly pick up the tone and tenor. Then, when it comes to writing your own paper, you can start copying the source without realizing it.

This sort of accidental plagiarism only shows up when you run the plagiarism check at the end of the writing process. To avoid this sort of outcome, you should do your research across multiple sources, such as:

1. Online journals
2. Research papers
3. Educational websites
4. E-books

2. Create a Structure before Starting

A lot of students can obliviously go off track when writing assignments. Although they themselves don’t find an issue in this, their checkers can count it as a negative factor when grading their paper. In short, going off track can show the checker that the student doesn’t actually know a lot about the topic at hand, due to which they divert from it in a bid to fulfill the word count requirements.

Moving on, the second benefit of structuring the layout before starting is that you’re able to save your research in one place. This way, you don’t forget the points later on and can recall them easily.

Last but not least, structuring the paper before starting it also gives you the benefit of understanding how long each part should be. A lot of students can make one part of the paper excessively long while keeping the next parts short. This can, apart from ruining the look of their paper, also adversely affect its quality.

3. Understand and Avoid Plagiarism

Although the crux of this tip is “avoiding plagiarism”, we’ve mentioned “understanding” it first because you can’t really avoid something if you don’t know what it is, to begin with.

Plagiarism is defined as the practice of taking an author’s content and utilizing it for oneself without giving the proper credit. Plagiarism is highly punishable in more or less every sphere of writing, but it is penalized severely when it comes to academia.

There are a lot of different types of plagiarism, some common ones of which are enumerated hereunder:

1. Direct plagiarism
2. Mosaic plagiarism
3. Source-based plagiarism
4. Self-plagiarism

That’s it as far as understanding plagiarism goes. Now let’s discuss how you can avoid it.

To start off, you have to ascertain which parts of your paper are plagiarized and which are unique. For this, you have to use an online plagiarism checker. There are a lot of them available online, but you have to use the one that is recommended by your educational institute.

After you find the plagiarized parts in your paper, you have to fix them. When we say “fix”, there are a number of different things that you can do, such as:

• Simply putting the plagiarized parts in quotation marks to relinquish ownership
• Citing the parts using citations + references in the style prescribed by your institution
• Manually paraphrasing the content to alter the wording while retaining the actual meaning

When it comes to the last step i.e., paraphrasing, you should only do this if the plagiarism in question is accidental. In other words, you shouldn’t just take anyone else’s content and then paraphrase it for yourself.

4. Be Careful About Proofreading

This is a very important tip that you can stick to in order to improve the quality of your college assignments.

No matter how much thought you’ve put into writing the assignment and no matter how scrupulous you’ve been about not making errors etc., you should always proofread your write-up.

During the proofreading phase, here are some things that you have to keep an eye out for:

1. Spelling errors

2. Grammar and punctuation errors

3. Readability issues

4. Formatting issues

5. Citations

Of course, you can take help from online tools during this whole process. You can try using a grammar checker for finding the spelling and grammar errors in the content. In the same way, you can use a readability checker to find out how difficult your write-up is to read.

Conclusion

If you follow the tips mentioned above, you can improve the overall quality of your assignments and reduce the chances of them getting rejected. While all four steps are important, if we had to pick one of them as the essential one, we’d go with the first one i.e., researching from different sources.