University students have a nightmare when they hear about assignments or projects as a task from their professors because they must exhibit their best to score good marks for those assignments. Some students who start to write their academic documents might be unaware of the mistakes (whether trivial or vital) that might delay their graduation or could cause them to lose marks or points in their assignments. Preparing an assignment requires in-depth research, expert consultation, deep learning. No wonder why assignments are seen as the toughest part of their college life.
To make their life easy, college students should pay attention to the following tips to avoid making the common errors:
Insufficient background research
The most common mistake university students make while writing assignments or essays is that they lack sufficient knowledge about the subject and miss doing proper research about the topic before writing about it. In addition to that, they also miss referring to the right sources to perform their research. The students should consult the librarian (in a library of course!!) or online academic resources to find the right content and coin it clearly in the essays or assignments to be presented at the university. This will help them to boost their performance and students will stand a good chance of scoring well. They should always give their full potential to understand the given topic by doing a lot of research on that topic.
Redundant Information
Secondly, students should try to avoid presenting similar information repeatedly at different places in the written assignment. Students often repeat the same sentences in order to fill the assignment which might cost them a lot by losing precious marks. Some of them provide the same content in both Introduction & Conclusion segments which will make your assignment dull and boring. Hence, always try to fill in with lots and lots of information as possible, try to end the content with ideas, suggestions, add images, raise questions for the audience to think, and avoid redundant information in the document. Repetition of words, phrases & clauses shows that students are not in full understanding of the topic assigned. Students should always try their best to set the first impression on professors with their rich content and no redundant data.
Plagiarism
Another common mistake that often goes unnoticed by students is duplicate check tests run on assignments by professors. Students should avoid copying content from online websites or books as such and should try to be creative while writing assignments to score high marks. There are several plagiarism checkers online like Copyscape that can be used to ensure the written assignment is free of duplicate content. The plagiarism report shows the percentage of content that’s copied from other sources and not cited in the document. This report reveals that students have not done their basic research resulting in serious impacts and is considered an offense. Students should always avoid the following steps to overcome plagiarism:
- Avoid Copy-Pasting – Never copy and paste content from other’s works as it indicates that students have completed the assignment without spending much effort.
- Missing Citations – Don’t miss adding citations in the written assignment.
- Avoid Entire quotations – While copying sentences from other sources, add quotation marks with a citation to avoid plagiarism.
- Get Permissions – In order to use a copyrighted study, get permission from the copyright holder.
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No Formatting & Grammatical Mistakes
Students often ignore the importance of formatting the document which plays a major role in scoring high for assignments. They should always make sure that the document is properly aligned, titles are appropriately named, sentences are grammatically correct so that the document looks neat and readable for the reviewers. They should also concentrate on the tone which is to be always formal and avoid using informal pronouns as language reflects their personality. Sometimes students trying to elaborate a topic frames sentences so confusingly that it becomes unclear to the professors. Other than these mistakes, they also end doing a lot of spelling errors while writing assignments which must be given the utmost importance because that reflects one’s professional ability and skills. There are several online spell check websites like Grammarly.com that helps to do the corrections. Finally, ensure that the structure of the document is appropriate and narrates the story well. The structure of the document is very important because ordering the content helps in conveying the information clearly. Therefore, proper titles, related images, appropriate order completes an assignment.
Inadequate Citation and Academic Referencing
Another mistake that students do is not consulting enough educational resources and references and improper use of citation which spoils their work. Academic referencing and citing means acknowledgment of sources used in the assignments. Citing a reference acknowledges the study students have referred to and allows professors to find the work that they have cited. Each source cited in the assignments has some implications. Academic referencing conveys that students are not the first ones to write on that topic and shows that they do use others’ ideas to create a new one. Thus, professors could track those references to get more ideas about a particular point they have made and also allows them to see how dated the information might be. Usage of words, facts, ideas, or explanations from other works should be cited. When students have copied texts from an essay, an article, a book, or other sources verbatim, which are called quotations, those must be academically referenced. One should do the referencing even if they use an idea or a fact from some other’s work or even if they haven’t used their exact expression. Only when the information is considered as common knowledge, it need not be cited.
Academic referencing projects students’ efforts and validates their work and hence it’s very important to provide sufficient citations and academic referencing in assignments.
So students and writers do keep in your mind the above-mentioned points to avoid while writing an essay or assignment or article. Happy writing!!