Top Two Tips For A Successful College Essay

When you start college, whether you're fresh from high school or an older person returning to education, there are certain skills you will need to develop if you want to pass. Just as you wrote essays and papers in high school, you will be required to write them in college with just a bit more attention to what is called academic discipline.

This article gives you two of the most valuable tips that will help you do well in college. Tip one shows you the importance of academic discipline and giving credit to other people. Tip two is just as important, probably more so, because you have to implement tip two in order to make the time to learn tip one.

Tip One

In college, as I said earlier, you will be expected to adhere to commonly accepted academic discipline whenever you engage in formal writing. The first time you are given a topic for a college essay will be the beginning of your experience in formal writing in college. Academic discipline or academic rigor, refers to the practice of giving credit in the proper way to sources that you have used while researching your essay.

When you wrote essays in high school, by the end of your study you were probably expected to give a nod to your sources, i.e., Joe Brown once said that "writing essays is easy". The latter statement would probably have been a significant attribution for you to get by in high school; this is not the case with a college essay.

There are referencing and citing rules in colleges and universities on how you deal with these things. This will depend on whether your college uses the APA (American Psychological Association), Chicago, or Harvard referencing systems. You will probably be given some sort of handout at the beginning of your study regarding the reference system in use, guard it with your life as you will need to refer to it time and time again.

Tip Two

Set up a time table. When you were at high school you had plenty of formal teaching and probably a couple of hours a week should have been devoted to homework, including working on your term papers. You probably tried to get away with a lot less homework than the curriculum required, and wouldn't have dreamed of scheduling your time.

In college there is less formal teaching and more emphasis on filling out your lecture notes with the meat of a subject on your own time. Most lectures are between one and three hours long, and these may be followed by a tutorial session that is about student contributions to the preceding lecture.

You need to schedule your independent study time, usually around ten hours a week, more at exam and assignment time, or as needed. The only way to do this is to list everything that you need to do, including personal hygiene, everyday, including weekends. Once you've done this you should be able to schedule in your lectures and personal study time, which means you may have to cut back on TV, Play Station and/or other leisure activities.

When you structure your time to allow for college work, it will be much easier to get through your course, and it will also help you to use your time well once you leave college to start your career.