It is the fact that writing of academic articles and term papers has often been a challenge to many students and I am not an exception. Academically, excellent writing skills aid in getting satisfactory grades. Sadly, I did not only have poor writing skills, but also a poor command of English. To improve my writing, I had to learn how to write proficiently by taking writing skills as an extra unit. Besides allocating more time to my extra unit, I had to do research on ways of improving my writing skills.

Firstly, improving my writing skills was to analyze my written work critically. I had to rely on other students with strong writing skills to correct my papers. Most of my term papers had poor grades because of the spelling and grammar mistakes, lack of clarity and poor content. Rarely did the lecturer award any mark on the spelling and grammar slots. For example, the common comments on my papers included, “read your work before submission” or “read widely to improve your grammar”.

Also, I had to form a positive student-teacher relationship between my teacher and I. with my goals well outlined the lecturer was not hesitant in assisting me in improving my writing skills. The lecturer had to give me extra lessons and assignments to make sure I was picking up his comments.

Next, in order to rewrite my poor graded papers, I had to write extra papers as a practical lesson. At least I had to write a new paper every single day to check on my skills. My lecturer marked all the extra papers instructing me on, which ways to follow. I had to peruse through many English text books to learn about verbs, adverbs, and sentence construction among other issues. More over, I had to learn on the method of writing different essays (descriptive, expository, and argumentative) from books and read journals to improve my writing.

Besides, I had to learn on how to organize and construct an academic paper. All papers have a similar format , where the introduction, body and conclusion are mandatory. However, the content of these sections always seemed to be challenging especially in formulating a strong thesis. Actually, the arrangement of the body paragraphs always seemed to be poor. Each paragraph has to have a topic sentence, which describes a specified point. Nevertheless, through continuous practice and reference from other well-written papers, I was able to sail through smoothly.

Furthermore, I had to visit a writing centre to interact with the tutors and to learn from them on how to improve my writing skills. Before giving me a lecture on the basic qualities of a good paper, my tutor asked for my term papers to ascertain my level of skills.

To sum up,  the quality of a paper is also a crucial element for a person who has decent writing skills. However, reading a variety of papers and books improves a person’s ability in writing an excellent paper. The last task in the writing centre was to write a 1-page paper on ‘how to improve my writing skills”.