Intro
School teachers and parents lay a cornerstone of their children’s future academic success. Oftentimes, college and university students struggle to craft well-written academic essays mainly because they have been doing it wrong during school years. Academic writing is an essential part of all disciplines, so your kid will inevitably deal with it during their studies. Therefore, read further to know how to help your child succeed in writing all kinds of papers.
Encourage Your Child
You should accept the fact that your kids will complain about studying and writing in particular. They will whine, cry, and sometimes even get depressed. But don’t put them into overwhelming stress by blaming and judging them.
Instead, encourage your children and explain to them that receiving bad marks is okay since they are students, not professors. They go through the process of learning, and making mistakes is an unavoidable issue.
Teach Your Kid to Outline their Essay
Starting an essay is sometimes the most challenging task. Your child may stare at the computer screen or a notebook for half an hour, slowly getting angrier because they have no idea how to start writing. Outlining the essay first allows kids to focus their attention on separate paragraphs. It is easier to break the essay topic into smaller parts and cover them individually.
Divide and rule! Besides, an essay outline will help them express their ideas logically. So, explain the basics of writing a paper template to your child. The simplest structure consists of:
- Introduction
- Body paragraphs
- Conclusion
Students can include as many body paragraphs as needed to cover the essay topic fully. So explain to your children the importance of creating an outline first. Besides, you can practice making essay structures together.
Help Your Child with Research
Teaching children to conduct research is essential. Explain to them that they should find additional sources of information alongside school knowledge. This will help them conduct more in-depth research in college or university. So, it is better to develop research skills when essay requirements are much less demanding compared to those of future assignments.
Tell them about such notions as authority and relevance of information. They have to capture ideas from authoritative journals, scholarly articles, and online libraries instead of random websites on the web.
Also, they have to get used to reading the latest articles and prioritize new information sources. Teachers may not accept an essay with 50-year-old sources included in the bibliography or reference list.
Many discoveries, especially in physics, astronomy, and biology, were made during the last decade. For instance, gravitational waves were officially registered only in 2017. So, students should use not only authoritative but also relevant arguments and evidence in their essays.
Explain the Importance of Time Management
Meeting deadlines is crucial, and children have to learn how to deliver essays on time. They have to finish a piece at least a couple of days before the due date since leaving time for elaborating on an assignment is immensely important.
Ideally, they should start working on their project the same day they have received an assignment. Therefore, you should implant the basics of time management in your children. For instance, they can set personal deadlines before due dates. This will ensure that they will finish their tasks on time.
Advise Them to Edit Their Writing
As mentioned before, kids have to leave a couple of days for polishing their essays, which involves editing and proofreading. Yet, these two different methods of writing improvement are often confused.
Editing involves making significant alterations like rewriting, elaborating, or deleting the entire sentences and paragraphs. On the contrary, proofreading means correcting errors that can occur during the editing process. Children have to revise and reread their essays several times to master these skills. Also, you can recommend them to use online spelling, grammar, and stylistic checking tools.
Be an Editor
As a parent, you have much more studying experience under your belt since you got through it years ago. Spend some time on evaluating your kid’s essay. Check how they created an outline, researched the topic, used logical transitions between the paragraphs, etc. If you have no time for this, you can always ask a professional essay writer to do this task. There are hundreds of creative writing services on the web providing academic support to both students and their parents.
Use Online Help
If you have always been bad at essay writing and have no idea how to explain this or that stuff to your kids, you can address a professional academic writing service. You can benefit from these agencies in many ways. For instance, you can send your child’s paper for revision to let the experienced writers fix it. Or, you can order an assignment to use it as a sample for your kids. You can also read useful writing materials and guidelines on academic writing websites and recommend them to your kids.
Conclusion
Essay writing is a tricky subject. Some can handle academic assignments with ease due to natural talent, and some need dozens of hours of hard work to keep up with the first. If your kid experiences challenges in essay writing, you should invest time or money (or both) in their study routine.
The tips mentioned above will help you figure out your child’s writing struggles more easily. But if you cannot afford to spend much time on them, you can always address an online essay writing service to receive professional assistance.
