Strategies for Effective College Level Writing

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To know how to improve your college level writing skills, first of all you need to understand what college level writing is. Melzer (2011) states that College-level writing is a broad term with many different characteristics which focuses on self-thinking rather than engaging material with the idea that you have to agree with everything the author of the writing has to say; you have to know how to do proper research, your writing has to be persuasive, the organization of your ideas has to be sophisticated which means it has to varied, not following the same order/template every time, and all the arguments that you estate in your writings have to have strong back up support; grammar, and vocabulary are part of these characteristics as well (Melzer, 2011). Many students get to college thinking that college-level writing is pretty much the same as high school; they think that all they have to do is use big complicated words, and sound smart. One thing about college writing is that if you do not struggle then you did not put as much time to your work as you should have had. College is meant to make students think “outside the box,” in your classes you are expected to know a lot of things that you were probably not even taught back in high school and that is when students realize they are a little behind. Jameson (2007) said that more and more students are getting to college unprepared, without the necessary writing, reading, and analyzing skills that they need to succeed in college (Jameson, 2007). On top of that students do not know how to apply the writing skills that they already know to their college classes. It may be that students get overwhelmed and frustrated when they realize that the writing they do in college has the sam... ... middle of paper ... ...duality might not be something that you expected from college, but the more you challenge somebody else’s work with your own ideas/statements, the more you will show your teachers that not only you understood the writing/reading, but that you were also able to deeply analyze it and made your own conclusions about that particular topic. Works Cited Angeli, E., Wagner, J., Lawrick, E., Moore, K., Anderson, M., Soderlund, L., & Brizee, A. (2010, May 5). The Purdue Online Writing Lab (OWL). Retrieved from http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/01/ Donovan, M. (2007). Writing Forward. Retrieved from http://www.writingforward.com Mascle, D. D. (2013). Writing Self-Efficacy and Written Communication Skills. Business Communication Quarterly, 76(2), 2-7. doi: 10.1177/1080569913480234 Melzer, D. 2011. Exploring College Writing. London, GBR: Equinox Publishing Ltd

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