Style in writing is not the same as style in choosing clothes, accessories, or other fashion details. This article will provide you with several recommendations to improve your writing style.

1. Choose the style for the audience you are going to address

It’s better to follow the first tip before you start writing, right after formulating the main idea of your text. Different audiences require various approaches to presenting your arguments and creating an appealing impression from your text. For instance, when creating an academic text, you should be as specific and formal as possible. However, you can break this rule and let your thoughts flow free in reflections or other types of texts that focus on one’s emotions and inner transformations. Still, this choice is helpful for planning your future writing and starting the selection of sources and samples that you will use for the text.

2. Write an outline

The outline creates the text structure, but well styled text is impossible without a clear organization of the thoughts that you want to express. Consequently, an outline can become a skeleton of your text, and you can decorate it with smaller details and accessories to create a quality essay in the end. The outline should be concise, not more than five or six sentences. Each sentence should express the main idea of a single paragraph and try to formulate them briefly. Their development will come later, and now you need to make a short presentation to stick to it in your writing.

3. Add details to your essay

Everyone knows that accessories create half of the outfit, and most professional writers use the same approach to using examples and explanations in their essays and articles. As soon as you have the main thought of each paragraph, try to provide it with decent support. Apply to readers’ logic or explain how you reached this conclusion. Another option is to give examples that demonstrate that your approach is working. In the case of academic essays or business writing, for example, company reports, you can use statistics and reference scientific articles to support your idea.

4. Choose your sources thoroughly

As soon as you decide to add examples to your text, you need to add reputable sources that ontain credible information from an expert. Google is a good place to start searching, but it’s better not to add each blog, generic website, or online encyclopedia to your essays. If you need more academic information, you can use top specialized search engines, such as Google Scholar or Web of Science. In this case, literature reviews on a selected topic can be a good help, as their authors try to provide an overview of their area and cover all aspects of the current research conducted by different scientific commands.

5. Be logical and keep calm

Many students, especially when it comes to emotional topics, such as social justice, world poverty, or environmental problems, try to build their arguments on appealing to readers’ emotions. Although most readers agree that poverty should be diminished worldwide and that we need to take care of our planet, repetition of these ideas does not make essays impressive. Thus, a writer needs to build arguments on a stronger foundation than just emotions and describe the struggles of the subjects discussed in your paper. Selection of sources and reformulating their arguments to adapt them to your text is necessary to reach this goal.

6. Bear in mind the requirements for your essay

If you need to write an essay for college or university, check all requirements provided by the professor twice. Although general rules for college essay writing in the U.S. do not significantly differ from academic articles or reviews, specific educational institutions can have their limitations that modify small details, referencing style or paper organization. If you are unsure if you handle everything correctly, you can use a college essay writing service provided by numerous companies online. CustomWritings is a professional paper writing service that allows students to buy original and custom essays that they can order to polish their academic writing skills and improve their understanding of writing mechanics. Additional cheap services offered by the company writers through the website include providing a customer with detailed comments on a personalized paper structure, style, and organization to facilitate the application of this information to complete another assignment later.

7. Avoid plagiarism

Almost every professor reminds students that they need to submit papers written only by themselves. However, a student sometimes needs to use assistance and reference a paper or research by other specialists. This practice is perfectly acceptable in writing from scratch, but you need to follow several simple rules to avoid plagiarism and consequent violation of academic integrity rules. Namely, try to reformulate other people’s thoughts and not cite them directly. If you need to insert a direct quotation, don’t forget to put a reference to a specific work and mention the author’s surname and page number if necessary. The same applies to citations of numerical data, and you need to put its source unless you have collected them yourself.

8. Check grammar and spelling

Good style starts with correct grammar and following spelling and punctuation rules. The first way to make your text more polished is to re-read it paying attention to grammar instead of content, style, or structure. However, if you are not sure if your knowledge of English is perfect enough, you can use online spell checkers. Advice from these programs or applications can be good, but think about corrections they propose instead of simply accepting them. 

9. Plan your writing ahead

It may be the hardest advice to follow, but try not to miss deadlines and write your essays at the last moment. Most college papers are not as complicated as dissertations, theses, and other works that require weeks or even months of preparation. Still, if you have two weeks to write the essay, try to start gathering information and organizing an outline of your future work at least a week ahead. This can save you time, so you don’t have to write in a hurry trying to squeeze all pages in a few hours before the last submission deadline.

10. Review your essay before submission

This review action can take from five to ten minutes of your time, but later it can save you more, as you can catch and correct the smallest mistakes you missed during the previous correction. These tiny imperfections will not significantly affect your future results, but it is better to avoid them to make a better impression on a person who will read your paper. So try your best to improve your writing style by following this advice—and good luck!