Approaches to College Essays

Introduction Writing is one of the most difficult skills for students to acquire at any educational level. Unlike spoken language, writing in a college setting requires the reader or the audience to understand and interpret what has been written. Writing is therefore difficult as it is both more complex and more abstract than talk, and that is what makes writing to be irritating to students. It is, also true that writing needs hard work as it is a skill that is difficult to master. Whatever level a student finds himself or herself, writing poses a number of challenges. It demands a great deal of skills and knowledge of conventions such as writing readiness and grammatical rules for the students to become proficient and effective writers. Besides that, teachers too face great challenges in teaching these skills and conventions as students may, at times, find them confusing and difficult to understand, when they want to write effective essays. Writing therefore is not just putting pen to paper or writing down ideas, but it is how these ideas are presented or expressed effectively. This highly demanding process of writing requires a number of skills and conventions like organization in the development of ideas and information; a high degree of accuracy in choosing the right words so that there is no ambiguity of meaning and also the right use of complex grammatical devices to focus and emphasize ideas. In addition, writing demands the writer to have careful choice of the right academic format (MLA, APA, etc.), the use of appropriate vocabulary and grammatical patterns and the ability to write sentence structures that are suitable to the subject matter. In addition to having knowledge in skills and conventions of writing, students have to practice a lot of writing on their own. However, there are other factors that may affect the writing performances of students. It is the objectives of this book to guide students in writing their college essays i.e. essay structures, content, organization, vocabulary, language use and mechanics. The goal is to guide each student in his or her writing performance, from when they are matriculated to when they are awarded their doctorate degrees. Padmore Agbemabiese, Ph.D.