From a young age, educational institutions focus on training students in speaking and writing skills. Starting with recognising, identifying and writing the English alphabet, students gradually progress to making words, constructing sentences, and writing full-length logical answers.
Several researchers have dug deeper into the correlation between writing and academic success. According to a paper published by BMC Medical Education, the researchers have found empirical evidence to introduce writing in medical studies since it improves higher-order thinking.
Yet, writing continues to be one of the most despised activities by students across all educational levels and disciplines.
Why Do Students Hate Writing?
Based on my personal experience and what I’ve been able to gather from professional academic experts, most students generally prefer to avoid writing because of academic pressure. Being forced to write hundreds of assignments every semester, they barely have enough time to focus on quality instead of quantity.
In addition to the stress of tight deadlines and increasing pressure to up the writing standards, other factors that contribute to this general dislike include the following:
- Lack of mastery over the English language
- Fear of making grammatical and spelling mistakes
- Inability to frame sentences correctly
Unless these issues are addressed at an early stage, the dislike towards writing continues to grow, inhibiting the opportunity for students to thrive academically. That’s because students increase their reliance on oxford reference generator and proofreading tools instead of polishing their writing skills.
Exploring 10 Ways Writing Influences Your Academic Success
Writing is an essential skill that not only expands your opportunities for academic success but also arms you with enough ammunition to make a decent living once you leave the world of academics.
From a student’s perspective, writing is bound to be a tedious task where you’re forced to pen your thoughts on paper and master basic grammar. However, writing is more than just blindly following conventions. Instead, this skill boosts creative thinking and problem-solving skills while allowing students to reflect on their words.
On that note, let’s explore how writing skills play a major role in boosting your academic success.
1. Enhances your creativity
Creativity is one crucial factor that sets an extraordinary student apart from an ordinary one. Now, what is creativity? When can you say that an idea is creative? Usually, the “creative” title is bestowed upon something that’s out of the box. Many students believe that creativity is a skill few possess from birth. However, that’s not entirely true. Everyone is born with a creative streak, and writing regularly can hone this ability effectively.
Creativity takes a back seat when you realise you can paraphrase content from the internet and call it a day. But when you forget the shortcut and write your answers by hand without relying on paraphrasing, your brain finds the stimulation to let the creative juices flow.
2. Improves your logical reasoning
Due to the vast abundance of online equation solvers and other similar academic tools, students have sacrificed their logical reasoning abilities. After all, when you can rely on an online tool to provide immediate solutions, you naturally want to avoid forcing yourself to use the logical part of your brain.
However, when writing assignments, your brain tries to figure out the best ways to arrange the points and arguments to endure they make logical sense. Additionally, you polish your critical thinking abilities as you figure out the sections you’d need to highlight from multiple sources in your paper.
These skills – logical reasoning and critical thinking – are vital to success in any discipline. Therefore, it’s not surprising that students who write well exhibit high levels of both skills.
3. Expands your vocabulary
During your early school days, you’ll have classes where you’ll be taught new vocabulary words every few weeks. But at some point, while growing up, those classes are abandoned, and you’re expected to continue expanding your vocabulary by yourself. Now, as your progress through every grade, you need to upgrade your writing skills. And this consequently leads to an expansion of vocabulary.
An assignment written with more refined words and styled with elegant sentences with a dash of appropriate literary devices will ensure people will focus on your paper more. With an extended vocabulary, you’re sure to leave an impressive mark on your readers.
4. Increases your knowledge capacity
Since a lot of research is involved with writing any assignment, it boosts your knowledge of various topics. Ask any PhD student how long it took them to write their thesis paper, and they’ll say something between 2-5 years. During these years, they’ve read through hundreds of research papers, dissertations, blogs, journals, news reports, and more. Hence, even if every piece of information wasn’t required for their thesis paper, they still had to read many papers.
As you continue writing your assignments, your memory and retentive capabilities increase. These are significant skills required to breeze your way through your academic years and find success. Moreover, increased knowledge in several areas will come in handy for various interviews.
5. Boosts your confidence
Imagine the number of times you’ve completed your assignments on time and ended up with an excellent grade. The sense of accomplishment that follows is quite addictive. With improved writing skills, you continue to dominate your assignments, leading to a significant rise in self-confidence.
When you become confident in your ability to compose high-quality papers, you won’t have to panic when encountering a complex paper. Usually, most students relying on professional academic helpers for their assignments need more confidence in their writing skills. So, when you continue writing to polish your abilities, you’re sure to get the confidence boosts required to tackle your assignments.
6. Fosters ability to refine and communicate ideas
The ability to organise and express your ideas from your mind to paper improves when you improve your writing skills. If you check out a few stream-of-consciousness novels, like James Joyce’s Ulysses or Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes From Underground, you’ll realise that a person’s mind is never thinking in a linear direction. Even if you try to concentrate on one topic, you’re sure to experience moments when your mind will stray from the topic.
Therefore, when you practice writing, you put together the pieces of your stray thoughts, refine the content and express it in decipherable terms to communicate your ideas. The more you work on this skill, the easier it becomes to express complex thoughts.
7. Guarantees better communication skills
Communication skills are essential to hone from an early age, especially if you wish to succeed in academics and life in general. In many instances, you would be required to work on group projects together with your peers. However, if you cannot convey what you wish to express properly, you won’t be able to express good teamwork. As you reach college and university and learn to navigate the complexities of higher education, having excellent communication skills is guaranteed to open many doors of opportunities.
Of course, when your writing is top-notch, you don’t have to worry about your communication skills. That’s because you’re mastery of the English language and knowledge of grammatical rules and sentence construction ensures you can communicate simple instructions and requests without fear of being incomprehensible.
8. Provides opportunities for reflection
Writing allows you the opportunity to be reflective. Throughout the academic years, you’ll encounter multiple pieces of writing that require expressing your honest thoughts and opinions regarding certain issues. Whether it’s an essay, research paper or dissertation, you cannot help but learn more about yourself, your thoughts, and your motivations. Once you connect your brain to your heart, it becomes easier to reflect on your life.
Such reflection allows you to focus more on your goals instead of allowing distractions to hinder your progress. Moreover, you become less susceptible to self-doubt when your heart and brain are connected to one goal.
9. Allows you to leave a good impression
When your writing skills are above the average level of your peers, you stand a chance to leave a favourable impression on your professor. Naturally, a good impression increases the chances of an A+.
In an age where students have increased access to learning resources and a vast treasure trove of knowledge in the form of the internet, the academic standard has risen incredibly. Therefore, even if you compose a well-researched paper, you must stand out from others who have written similar papers. As long as your writing style stands out, you’re bound to improve your chances of finding academic success.
10. Makes it easier to score better grades
When you’re able to write well, it becomes easier to communicate ideas, arrange points logically, and ensure you don’t alienate your readers. Using proper grammar, spelling, and better vocabulary and ensuring your writing is engaging will improve your grades.
And as much as people harp on how grades don’t matter in the long term, they would surely matter if you plan to apply to a good university or abroad program. So, as long as your writing skills are up to the mark, you will have one less thing to worry about.
Bonus Suggestions to Improve Your Writing Skills
Of course, it’s impossible to expect every student to have an innate talent for outstanding writing skills. Usually, it would help if you honed them from a young age. But if you still need more confidence in your writing, there’s plenty of time to polish your abilities. All you must do is follow these few tips:
- Avoid overstuffing your paper with technical jargon your reader might not know
- Do not procrastinate and leave your writing till the last minute
- Read more books, blogs, articles, etc. and diversify your genre
- Crush up on fundamental grammatical rules
- Try to avoid using passive voice in every other sentence
While expecting better results immediately may be pushing it too far, you can expect an improvement in your grades over time. And once you begin to improve your writing skills, you’ll surely be on the road to academic success.
Summing it up,
Writing skills are intrinsic to achieving success and recognition in the academic world. Even though most students despise writing, the benefits of improving your writing abilities far surpass the reasons to avoid writing. Furthermore, the ten reasons highlighted here should encourage you to improve your skills and leave a favourable impression on your readers.
Author bio:
Laurence Johnson is a PhD in English and assists students at MyAssignmenthelp.com struggling to write proper citations without the help of an Oxford reference generator. He has been associated with the assignment guidance & give option to pay for assignments from 6+ years.
