To succeed, university students have to hone their skills and learn new ones. Some skills are fairly easy to improve on or learn. Unfortunately, others are not. For many writing any kind of academic paper is a struggle.

It is all too easy to get things wrong and end up submitting sub-standard academic papers, despite your best efforts. Understanding what the most common errors are and how to avoid making them is a great first step in improving your academic writing.

Being seen as a plagiarist

Universities check all submissions for plagiarism. Many use a system called Turnitin, which looks for similarities between your papers and what has been published elsewhere. Understandably, many students want to find out if Turnitin is free or not. They want to use it to check that what they have written will pass through this checking system successfully.

Unfortunately, this very sophisticated plagiarism system can only be bought and used by educational institutions. So, students actually cannot use it.

But, there are other very effective plagiarism checkers that they can utilize. The best ones are all paid for tools. But, don’t balk at this cost. You should view putting your academic papers through one of these as being an investment in yourself. If what you write does turn out to be too similar to what has been written before, there is a real danger that your paper could be rejected.

Learn to be concise

An awful lot of students produce documents that are too wordy. This is a huge error to make. Including too much fluff makes it look like you do not know or understand your subject as you should.

Writing concisely is a tricky skill to acquire. But, it is an important one, so you really should take the time to learn it. This short article explains how to write concisely when creating an academic paper.

Too many footnotes

Footnotes are a useful way to guide your readers and empower them to learn more. They also help the marker to see that you have carried out through research. But, it is all too easy to overuse them. When you do this you can easily end up confusing and annoying your reader. So, always double-check that your footnotes are justified.

Failing to understand and adapt to your audience

A good writer will always think about who is going to be reading what they write. Doing this enables you to work out what points you should be including and how best to make them. It also informs the type of language you need to use.

Handing work in late

Missing deadlines is not tolerated. If you think you are going to be late handing things in, make sure that you formally ask for an extension. But, be careful not to do it too often and to always have a good reason for doing so.

Not asking for help

The above are the most common mistakes students make when writing academic papers. But, they are not the only ones. So, it is a good idea to speak to your tutor and former students to learn more.

There is no shame in asking for assistance. Doing so, when you need to will greatly increase your chances of graduating with a good degree.