10 Essay Writing Problems and their Easy Solutions

Writing skills are crucial in every student’s life. They are essential in life after school, but most of them cannot fully develop those skills after completion.

Below are some common essay writing problems for most students and their solutions.

Common Essay Writing Problems for Students and their Solutions

While writing is necessary for college and professional life, there are a number of challenges that students face.

Here, we explore students’ common essay writing problems in colleges and universities and evaluate ways to get through them successfully.

Let’s delve into each in detail.

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1. Inadequate Development of Cognitive and Analytical Skills

The development of cognitive and analytical skills is crucial in writing. Students have to develop such skills to improve their writing abilities, enabling them to understand and think better.

Writing requires high school students to read and understand their writing prompts and develop their writing based on them. This understanding also shows the importance of college writing since it involves evaluation.

An easy way to solve such essay writing problems related to the skill you have to learn argumentative methods and practice them. You have to develop well-organized arguments. This requires analytical and cognitive skills and is seldom implemented in the high school curriculum.

2. Inadequate Writing Mechanics and Word Stock

Understanding the writing process and structure is also important. This means that students should understand the language they are writing, for example, English.

Written English comprises complex sentences, nouns, pronouns, adjectives, etc.

It has punctuation and other elements that make it communicative or understandable.

An essay way to overcome this problem is by learning basic writing mechanisms. For a student to effectively learn how to write, he or she must understand such mechanisms. This will also enable them to proofread and correct errors.

3. Inadequate or Lack of Feedback on Students’ Writing

High school teachers may give writing assignments to their students and fail to provide feedback after reviewing students’ work.

It is not enough for the teachers to give their students writing tasks grades.

It is important for teachers to provide comprehensive feedback to their students so that they can identify areas they have made writing errors or the sections they need to improve on.

To solve this problem easily, as your teacher for marking feedback on your previous essay.

Feedback is crucial in ensuring that students improve their skills with time. It is important to note that positive feedback promotes better writing skills than negative feedback.

4. Lack of Reading Exercises

Most students fail to write well because they lack any reading practice; they simply do not read. If you cannot read, you will definitely not have the content to write in college or anywhere. Lack of such content leads to poorly done essays and papers.

To solve this problem, you need to emphasize reading exercises. For high school students to be good writers, they should also be good readers.

In addition, teachers should encourage their students to read well-written works such as published essays, nonfiction works, or newspaper editorials to know the qualities of good works. It boosts their skills and vocabulary.

5. Writing Strong Introductions and Conclusions

Many students write poor introductions and conclusions for their essays and papers. Introductions are conclusions are very important in college essays. Introductions contain the introductory points of the essay and the thesis.

Conclusions, on the other hand, provide a summary of the essay. Most college students fail to observe this and mess up their essays.

6. Inability to Structure Coherent Arguments

Another common problem is the inability to structure coherent arguments. College students get bad grades because of their inability to use structured and coherent arguments.

Such arguments persuade the reader concerning the position of the essay. A good example is writing argumentative essays on animal testing, the death penalty, and related topics. For such, you have to create strong arguments. Check our guide on writing animal testing essays and learn how to do it.

To solve this essay writing problem of structuring coherent arguments, you must research how to write essays. College students should conduct adequate research, identify main issues and themes, and develop viable arguments backed by evidence.

7. Plagiarism

This is a major challenge for college students. Students may write their essays and fail to cite the sources of information. This results in plagiarism, and its penalty is very stiff.

To easily solve the essay writing problem of plagiarism, you need to research, then write, and not copy from other sources. Also, cite and reference your work well.

Students should learn how to cite sources of information appropriately. If students adhere to the guidelines, they can be excellent writers.

8. Awkward Constructions, Trite Expressions, and Clichés

Many students find themselves making sentence constructions that are not readily understandable. Their message may lose meaning due to how it is constructed, the expressions and words used, and its length.

Again, students may find themselves using trite expressions and clichés. This makes the content appear and sound unprofessional.

To solve these problems, practice and look for example samples and study them to see how experts have written them. We offer such expert example essays for free; check them out.

9. Use of Passive Voice

Most students find themselves overusing passive voice in their works. A passive voice is a sentence structure in which the subject receives the action instead of performing or initiating the action.

For example, students might write: “The ball was caught by the girl” (passive). It should be: “The girl caught the ball” (active voice).

The best way to solve this problem of writing essays is to practice and learn how to apply different voices in a sentence. Write sentences in both passive and active voice and ask your friend to evaluate you, and soon you will be heading to success in essays.

10. Inadequate Practice and Poor Revision in Writing

This essay writing problem comes from a lack of experience and practice. It is said practice makes perfect.

This applies to essay writing too. For students to improve in their writing, they have to practice.

This is because writing is a skill, and students have to work on the skill to develop and perfect it. High school students cannot advance their skills to higher levels without adequate practice.

To easily solve this problem, practice and do more practice. It is important for students to revise their written essays after being returned to them by their teachers.

This will give them an opportunity to correct their mistakes.

Revised work gives students an impression of how their work should always be. This encourages them to improve their writing.

Problems that Students have in Writing in English

Some common problems face most students when it comes to writing in English. They include:

1. Agreement

Some students may find themselves shifting their writing person style when writing. If they started with the third person (she, she, or it), they shift to the second person (you).

They also find themselves changing the tenses or numbers. If they have started using the singular, they find themselves using the plural later in their work.

2. Combining Sentences

Most students writing in English find themselves combining sentences into extremely long sentences. This may result in the awkwardness of the sentence. Others may opt to use extremely short sentences that result in a choppy effect.

3. Generalizations

Students writing in English will often have a tendency to generalize issues. This undercuts their authority as writers. Readers are forced to question the writer’s judgment on the issues he or she is writing about.

Other mistakes English writers make include wrong punctuation, repetition, redundancy, run-on sentences, and use of the subjective mood.

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Students’ Problems in General Academic Writing

The common problems students face in academic writing include:

1. Organization

Students involved in academic writing fail to organize their work in a format that adheres to academic guidelines.

There should be an introduction, body paragraphs, and a conclusion.

All the ideas and arguments are to be organized in the body paragraphs. Students may also use informal language, which is unacceptable.

2. Thesis Statements and Topic Sentences

Students also fail to include a thesis statement in their academic writing. This statement appears in the last sentence of the introduction. It should reflect what is to be discussed in the rest of the paper.

Students also fail to include strong topic sentences at the beginning of their body paragraphs (for academic writing) and anywhere within the paragraph in informal essays.

3. Evidence and Citation

Some students may also fail to provide evidence in their academic writing. They fail to provide proper citations to the source of information. This is academically wrong and a plagiarism case.

This may be a problem that forces students to look for help or essay writing tips when faced with academic writing tasks.

Problems ESL Students Face in Writing

There are several problems faced by English as a Second Language (ESL) students. The most common problems are:

• Inadequate linguistic proficiency

ESL students lack enough linguistic proficiency to write. This is because writing requires students to know English enough for them to transform their ideas into written text.

• Lack of ideas and anxiety in writing

ESL students cannot formulate ideas related to the English context. It is difficult for them to transform their original ideas into writing.

This also creates anxiety because they lack confidence in writing. It is worth checking some writing fears and anxieties to know how to face them.

• Reliance on L1

ESL students rely heavily on L1 (their first language) while writing. This results in writing issues because their L1 structure may differ from English. Directly translating from their L1 results in wrong word and sentence formations.

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Conclusion

If you have such problems as discussed above, apply some suggested solutions to beat the challenge and get the right grades in your academic writing. If you cannot, worry not, we have comprehensive essay help services that will help you get that grade. All the best!