General Writing Tips
A lot of graduate school work involves writing: not just writing your thesis or dissertation but writing research papers, laboratory reports, articles, summaries, and more. Follow these tips to strengthen your writing skills:
- Make sure you know what you're saying. Don't use a big word just to sound impressive. Your goal should be to communicate clearly and concisely.
- Have someone else proofread and edit your papers for you. No matter how carefully you look over a paper, you are bound to miss something because you'll see what you meant to type, not what the paper actually says.
- Figure out who your audience is and write for that audience. Your audience will affect not only what you write, but also how you write it. Are you writing for a technical audience that will understand professional terminology and jargon, or do you need to avoid such terms (or at least define them)? Do you need to provide background information? How much detail do you need to provide?
- Write with a purpose. Are you writing to persuade your audience, summarize data, or demonstrate your knowledge?
- Learn your style guide. Most programs use a particular style guide for citations and bibliographies, such as the American Psychological Association or the Chicago Manual of Style. Buy a copy of the style guide and become familiar with its basics so you don't have to look up the guidelines each time you write a paper.
- Learn how to type. This isn't really a writing tip, but if you learn how to type, your writing will go much faster than if you try to hunt-and-peck your way through graduate school. If you really can't type, break down and hire someone to do the typing for you.
- Keep backup copies of all your work. You REALLY don't want your computer to crash with the only copy of your dissertation on it.