Most high school students spend years preparing for college, especially when it comes to writing. No matter how perfect your sentence structure, grammar, and vocabulary, you may still find that college-level writing is like nothing you’ve ever experienced before and nothing like you’ve prepared for.
If you’re finding the transition difficult, you’re not alone. Obviously, standards are a bit higher at the college-level, but there’s more to it than that. In high school writing, you’ve probably spent a lot of time summarizing, speculating, and reacting in your writing. At the college-level, you’ll also be analyzing and presenting arguments.
Here are some tips for making your transition to college-level writing a bit easier.
Make Your Point
You may have written essays with a thesis statement before, but when you start writing college papers, everything depends on your thesis. Your thesis will state your argument, which is based on the evidence that you’ll be setting forth in your paper. This is the foundation for every paper you write. It can’t be too general, it can’t be too specific, and most importantly, it can’t be fact. It’s the first thing you should develop when beginning an essay.
Follow-up with Your Argument
Most college professors expect you to make an argument in your essays, which means that they expect you to make a claim that can be both challenged and proved. Not only do you want to convince readers to agree with you, but you also want to express why it matters. The evidence you provide will encourage readers to consider your ideas, and then decide to agree or disagree with you based on your argument.
Write with a Plan
Gone are the days of freewriting your essay responses. At the college-level, it’s important to write with intention. College-level writers should be able to create a basic outline to work from. This is a great way to show clarity in your writing, and it also ensures that your argument is supported by evidence, and supports your thesis statement.
Be Concise in your Writing
At some point in your writing career, you’ve probably written words, sentences, and paragraphs just to take up space. Perhaps you’ve even excelled at stringing words together so that they sound important and intelligent when really you were just trying to meet a minimum page requirement. These tactics may have garnered you an A in high school, but they won’t get you a great score on the CLEP College Composition exam, in class, or in the workplace.
Instead of writing more and saying less, you must write less, but say more. You need to make your case and get to the point. As William Strunk Jr. points out in The Elements of Style – “…when a sentence is made stronger, it usually becomes shorter. Thus, brevity is a byproduct of vigor.”
Remember that success as a writer is not just about impressing your professors, passing your CLEP, or making the grade. Improving your writing skills will help you in every facet of your life, no matter what profession you choose to pursue after college.
Get Becky’s Weekly Newsletter on Homeschooling High School
We will never sell or share your email address.
