Have you written a really well thought-out essay but found that your marks are lower than you hoped? You understood the topic, did your research and presented a sound essay. So what went wrong? There are a number of common errors that students make when writing up their research and this effects their marks.

Let’s have a look at some of these common errors. You can use this common errors list as an editing tool. After you’ve written your essay, go through your essay very carefully and check that you don’t have these errors. If you do, fix them up before you hand it in to your lecturer. This will definitely improve your marks.

Think about it like this: the less your lecturer has to pick up their pen to make corrections in your work, the better it is! It will take time to carefully fix your essay so don’t leave writing it to the last minute! Give yourself plenty of time to go through it. No-one ever writes something perfectly the first time. I often go through my work at least twice and, it’s sad but true, there are still sometimes typos or small errors. That’s why having an editor looking over your work is so helpful. If you feel you’ve done your best, ask someone to go through it for you. (But be sure to ask someone who knows what they’re doing otherwise that won’t be helpful at all!)

Common Errors:

1.Spelling mistakes

This is the number one common mistake. You should have no spelling errors in your work. Even one will mean that your lecturer has to lift up the pen and you don’t want that! Yes, we have spell check but the problem is that it doesn’t always pick up a word that’s spelt incorrectly in its context. Look at the following sentence:

‘The Analytic Phonics Approach requires a learner to have some phonological awareness witch is an essential skill for reading, writing, listening and speaking.’

Autocorrect does not pick up the incorrect spelling of ‘witch’ in this context. Clearly, it should be ‘which’. You’ll only pick that up by reading through your essay carefully.

More obvious errors such as: ‘They should encuorage the learner…’ will really make your lecturer think that you didn’t take time to go through your essay at all. It should be spelt, ‘encourage’.

2.Grammatical and punctuation mistakes

These types of errors can be tricky to pick up, especially for second language English speakers but if you look for them carefully, you should be able to fix most of them. Do ask someone to help you if you’re not sure.

Errors of concord are complex. Basically, the subject and verb need to be the same number. In other words, if the subject is plural, then the verb must be plural and visa-versa. Look at this example, ‘They go to university’ – plural – versus ‘She goes to university’. ‘They’ is plural therefore ‘go’ is the matching plural verb.

Other things to look for are overlong sentences such as: ‘The systemic approach requires lessons to be based on things and topics learners have been taught before or knowledge they are familiar with and lessons need to be learner-centred in order for them to really grasp and understand what is being taught to them and it is very effective because it teaches about grapheme-phoneme correspondences.’ This could be expressed in a much clearer way if the writer had broken it up into two or even three sentences. Don’t be afraid of short sentences!

Watch out for half sentences such as: “Namely Analytic, Synthetic, Systematic and Analogic’. A full sentence will always have a subject and a verb such as, ‘They are known as Analytic, Synthetic, Systematic and Analogic’.

Luckily, the auto grammar check in Word is reasonably good, but you will need to read your essay through to eliminate those that squeeze through the cracks. It’s actually very useful to read an essay aloud to yourself. Any sentence that doesn’t sound right when you read it probably has a structural problem and needs to be fixed.

Never use exclamation marks in an academic essay.

3.Lack of in-text referencing

Remember that every paragraph that you write in an academic essay needs evidence. You’ve seen that in the PEEL structuring of an argument. In-text referencing is part of the evidence you present from other peoples’ research. If you don’t have evidence it means that you are not arguing your point properly. If you use other people’s ideas in your essay without referencing them in the text then it is considered plagiarism. (You can read more about plagiarism here. You need to in-text reference every idea, paraphrase or quotation that comes from someone else.

It’s important to get the in-text referencing convention right. It should look something like this: (Machin et al., 2018) The ‘et al’ stands for ‘and others’ as this research paper had more than one author. You only need to include the first author in the text. You use brackets if your in-text reference comes at the end of the sentence but don’t use brackets if you’re referencing in the middle of a sentence.

In-text referencing is crucial to your argument. Without them, your essay is bound to fail.

4.Formatting mistakes

The basic format of an academic essay is paragraphs and full sentences. Don’t use bullet style formatting unless otherwise instructed.

5.Lack of consistency in written conventions used

Sometimes, you have to make the decision about what writing convention you’re going to take in your essay. This applies to various elements of the essay such as headings and the terms of things in your text. Perhaps you’re going to use title formatting in your headings such as, ‘Analytic Phonics Approach’. If you use this formatting in one heading, then all your headings must be exactly the same. Each first letter of a word must be in capital letters. Don’t change it to: ‘Analytic phonic Approach’. The ‘phonic’ here needs to be in capitals and include the ‘s’ in ‘phonics’ as you used in your first heading.

Be careful of how you use terms in your essay. Look at these examples, ‘of using phonics instruction’ and ‘our views of using the Phonics approach’. In the first example, phonics is spelt with a lowercase ‘p’ and in the next one it has a capital ‘P’. You need to decide which convention you’re going to use for this word (be guided by how other academics refer to it in their writing). If you decide that you’re going to write it in lower case, then you need to be consistent and do that throughout the essay.

It is these easily rectified small errors that creep into your writing and cost you those marks!

7. Unstructured paragraphs

Don’t forget that every paragraph needs its cake ingredients! It needs to include a point, evidence to prove the point and an explanation to explain how the evidence proves the point!! Always keep in mind the link to the main topic. PEEL! If your paragraph doesn’t have these elements it will be weak. In other words, your cake will flop!

6. Not using the correct language

Academic language means the use of formal words but also words that are specialised to the field. Choosing formal words, instead of the words you might use informally in speech keeps the tone of the essay detached and serious. The informal phrase ‘talk about’ becomes ‘discuss’ in formal language. Another example is the word ‘job’ which become ‘employment’ when you’re writing formally. There are many examples so try and make sure that you use the formal version of a word.

Specialised words are the words that someone who has an in-depth knowledge of the field they are writing in uses. They are more technical words that an outsider might not be familiar with. Examples range from ‘phonics’ in the field of literacy education to ‘dyspepsia’ (heartburn) in the field of medicine.

Hedging words can be used to improve your essay. These include words such as ‘probably’, ‘perhaps’, ‘likely’ etc. These words show that you understand that there is room for argument and doubt – as there is in most debates.

Don’t forget to use good linking words – often conjunctions – such as ‘however’, ‘thus’ etc that link your ideas.

8.Incorrect referencing

After all your hard work, you need to make sure that your referencing section at the end of the essay is perfect. Don’t let one comma, date or name be missing. Make sure everything is placed in the correct format used by your institution or your department. Check that it is in alphabetical order. It’s unfortunate that muddling things up at this stage can have such an impact on your essay’s marks but it will! Leave yourself enough time to do this well. It is, after your conclusion, the final impact you will have on your marker and you want to present a perfect document.

It is so easy for errors to creep in. Every single one of these errors will reduce your potential mark at the end, no matter how good your understanding and research was. This does mean that very careful editing needs to take place once your essay is written.

So, now you can see why your essays may not have been achieving the results that you felt they should have! I hope this gives you some good tips in academic essay writing and that you will be successful in the future. Yes, it does take loads of time and effort but it is worth it when you start getting top marks.