Academic writing assistance: grammar and punctuation errors

Writing something at the academic level can be scary for any student. Worrying over your writing style, whether your research is good enough, and if your teacher will like it are things that most students worry. Sometimes it’s best to just plow ahead with your work and not let these doubts stop you. In the end, you still have to procure an essay to hand in before the deadline, so you might as well make the process of writing it as easy on yourself as possible. Writing academic papers or essays is something that every student has to do eventually, so you aren’t alone. Here are a few suggestions to starting your academic writing:

  1. Before you start, know this: worry and stress are all in your mind, and you can get rid of them. All you need to do is not overthink things. When you sit down to start writing your academic paper, don’t let anything come into your mind and just start doing the steps towards writing it.
  2. The first step is to have your topic and outline the academic essay. Make a list of things you need to talk about, research you want to find, and what the overall idea of the essay will be.
  3. Now you can start doing some of that work. Again, let go of anything in your mind saying you can’t make a good academic level paper, or that all this work will be for nothing because you’ll have a failing grade. Just go through the motions of researching, collecting sources, and plugging them into your outline.
  4. Time for writing the first draft. Optimally, this should be the shortest and fastest part of academic writing. The faster you get out the first rough draft, the more time you have left for editing and perfecting your work.
  5. Spend some time away from your draft before you edit it, to get some fresh perspective when you reread it.
  6. After you’ve done all that, now you can pay attention to your grammar and punctuation. You really can’t correct anything if you don’t have your first draft done. Now, use your word processor’s spell and grammar checker. You’ll also want to have trusted friends and family read it. A lot of times there are issues or changes that need to be made that computers just don’t understand or miss.