Creative Writing Tips for College Students

Writing guide
Posted on June 11, 2013

Writing is an unavoidable task for everyone, be it necessary for college, junior school, or in a working environment. This means that we all should have some writing skills at our finger tips. However, college creative writing in in one way or another, differs from writing in high school. One key feature of college creative essay writing is the use of an argument, which should be set out in a systematic manner. This argument includes a claim, evidence supporting or refuting the claim, and limits to your claim.

To have a paper that is flowing and has depth, the first step should be to choose a topic that one is well informed about, and one that is easy to research. This saves one the agony of running out of material to write about. With a topic at hand, the next step is to plan the paper. This means that you write down your ideas as they come to mind, in order to avoid forgetting any of them.

When writing your draft, do not focus too much about the grammar and other related errors. You can always take care of this when writing the final paper. Do not forget to use your own voice, since what is read on the paper represents you as a person. Once you have exhausted all of your ideas, it is best to conduct research using various sources. Make sure to list the sources used, so that you do not leave out any of them when making in-text citations and preparing the reference list.

With a draft and sources ready, you can start writing the final draft of your creative writing paper. When writing, make sure to keep to certain guidelines, depending on the type of research paper that you are writing. For instance, a thesis paper has a different structure from that of a term paper. Further, the kind of formatting style used also determines the outline of your paper. A paper written using APA has a different structure from one written using the MLA formatting style.

When writing, it is important that students follow guidelines given by instructors. Not following instructions may lead to failure. Following given guidelines helps to limit your creative writing paper to a specific topic, which helps avoid ambiguity.

When writing, make sure to use short and clear sentences. These should be used to form flowing paragraphs, where each paragraph expounds on a single idea. It is also advisable that one avoids using big words of which the meanings are not clear. Avoid repetition, and make sure to use in-text citations in your work wherever necessary, so as to avoid instances of plagiarism. Before submitting your work, make sure to go through it and correct all grammatical and other errors.

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