Mistakes You Should Avoid When Writing Your Essay

An essay is supposed to be a continuous and captivating narration that captures and keeps the reader interested to the end. To come up with such piece of work, you must avoid some common writing mistakes that most people make.

• Listing Instead Of Narrating

Just like I have already mentioned, an essay is supposed to be in the form of a story. There should be a continuous flow of ideas without necessarily listing them down. Bullets should be a non-occurrence in your work if you want to get it right in this form of writing.

• Inconsistency Of Tenses

Since you are narrating, your tenses must be consistent from beginning to the end. If you are doing a past tense narration, do not mix with other tenses that make your work sound confused. The reader must be able to follow through without experiencing any disconnect.

• Direct Quoting

Using another person’s ideas or words to enrich your work is not wrong per se. The only problem is when you directly quote what the other person said instead of paraphrasing. Remember if you quote, the reader’s attention is immediately shifted to the quoted person. Your aim in writing should be to have the reader’s attention all through hence the emphasis on paraphrasing.

• Word Contractions

Try as much as you can not to use words or phrases in their contracted form. For instance, it is more appropriate to use ‘cannot’, instead of its contracted version ‘can’t’. Instead of won’t, you can use the whole phrase, ‘will not’. Contracted words and phrases do not bring out the proper sound of a narrative.

• Spelling

May be you are thinking that this is rather too obvious. However, as obvious as it sounds, spelling mistakes are common among most essay writers. It’s even worse when the misspelled word brings in a different meaning from the intended one. The reader feels like they are reading two stories in one. You can avoid such mistakes by making use of the spell checker. Again, make sure you do your work in good time so that you can find time to go through and correct any mistakes.

Some mistakes are not excusable on the basis of what subject you are addressing. There must be a pleasant flow and consistent tense.