• Getting the paper started: Most students find it difficult to get started with the paper or letter. Writing seems to flow with more ease once this first hurdle is overcome. Yet, this first step seems to be the hardest.
• Not knowing how to express your thoughts: Many students struggle in bringing their ideas down on paper in such a way that they make sense and create a coherent structure within the text.
• Your text is either too long or too short: Getting the length right is part of good writing, but most students struggle here. They often write texts that are either too long or too short and don’t know how to fit the text to the requirements.

If you become stuck with one or more of the above mentioned challenges, they quite commonly result in a writer’s block, as both motivation and concentration rapidly decreases. In this case, students often question their writing style and get down on themselves for the inability to structure their thoughts.  The following tips and ideas might help you to enhance your style of writing, your motivation and fun in it. 

For some reason, most students consider the idea of planning a paper as very time consuming and therefore dispensable. However, developing a mind map, a list of argumentations or even a mental image of the content of the paper does neither take too much time nor effort, as it helps you develop an initial structure to go along with during the whole writing process. This kind of mnemonic serves you in ensuring to cover the topic. Furthermore, by going along a list of articulated steps, you will focus on the pronounced goals instead of “making it up as you go along”. This, in turn, helps you to save valuable time in the end.

Procrastination until just the night before the paper is due is a common phenomenon among students. For some reason, students argue they write best this way, as they need mental pressure to be efficient. In most cases, this is not true. Procrastinating until the very end almost always has a negative influence on the quality of your paper. Instead, the most important aspect during a writing process is time management. You need to think ahead and give yourself ample time to plan, research, write and revise your text. The easiest way to do so is to reserve a short timeframe every day so you can complete your paper in gradual steps. This will definitely have a positive influence on your stress level and will also increase the quality of your final paper.

3. Start In the Middle

Not knowing how to start writing – that is a common problem that most writers face. In order to overcome this hurdle, try to skip the first paragraph and start in the middle rather than struggling for some profound argumentation or awe-inspiring moment to open your paper with. You can always come back to the first paragraph at the end, constructing the topic’s introduction in a final step. Try it, you will be amazed!

Striving for perfect writing from the very beginning will impede your writer’s flow. Therefore, when you start writing you should initially be ignoring the format, the rules of grammar and vague statements that need to be researched further. In this way you will have drafts that can serve as an outline. Mistakes can be corrected when proofreading afterwards. Keep in mind: what you write does not matter, what you rewrite is what matters.

In order to write a successful paper, you need to meet the requirements outlined in the assignment. Amongst others, that means keeping in line with the minimum and maximum pages allowed. It is much harder to write a short rather than a long paper, as this means you have to reasonably express all your thoughts on a (mostly) complex topic in a concentrated amount of words. If professors ask you to write only six to eight pages, they don’t do so because they assume you cannot produce more on the topic. They do so because they are convinced you cannot write less than six. The important thing to keep in mind is: a text that is too long can be easily shortened, but a text that is too short is difficult to lengthen.

More tips and tricks on how to improve your writing skills can be found in this article.