When writing essays, students face a lot of problems. There are 15 main ones that will be discussed in this article.

1) Not Understanding the Assignment: Getting the assignment wrong is one of the biggest problems students face when writing an essay because without understanding what they have to write about, it’s hard to complete a good paper. They might write about something completely different from what they were told to or not be able to coherently express their argument due to a lack of knowledge on the topic. When you don’t understand the assignment, finding sources and reading them properly for analysis becomes even more challenging. Hence it’s crucial to be clear on what your professor expects from you before you start working on a project.

2) Lack of Time: To run faster, students often don’t use their time properly. When writing essays, many of them spend too much time on the first few pages, not knowing that this is where they should be spending more time. The first few paragraphs are more important than any other section because they introduce your argument to the readers and make them interested in what you have to say. If you fail to capture their attention here, there’s a big chance they will stop reading the rest of your paper.

3) Not Understanding How Essays Are Evaluated: Even though most students read various types of essays during their education years, only a very small percentage actually understands how these writings are being evaluated by professors. If you want to know how essays work and what types of assignments you can get in college, try reading some sample essays for different types of classes. By doing so, you’ll be able to learn how scoring systems work and thus have a better understanding of what the professor is expecting from you when it comes to essays.

4) Not Clarifying Terms: Many students face problems with writing their own papers because they fail to check the terms being used by their professors on a regular basis. If your assignment asks you about something very specific that you are not familiar with, do your best to find out more information about it and clarify all the terms that might be confusing. It’s much easier to avoid making mistakes when using proper language than trying to deal with them after the got accepted by your professor already.

5) Making Assumptions: Sometimes students make assumptions about what their papers should look like. This is one of the biggest problems they face because if you’re assuming, you’re probably wrong half of the time. Instead of making assumptions, try to clarify anything that might be unclear to you and ask your professor for more details if necessary. If it turns out that something was not explained properly then perhaps it’s your fault for not asking enough questions before starting with the writing process.

6) Ignoring Feedback: When working on an essay, many students ignore the feedback their teachers provide them with or don’t take it seriously enough because they think this won’t affect their grades in any way. There are two consequences of doing so – firstly you fail to improve the quality of your work and secondly you don’t understand what went wrong which can cost you even more points. If something in your essay is not up to standards, try hard to learn from your mistakes instead of repeating them over and over again.

7) Not Knowing How Essays Are Structured: Another common problem students face when writing an essay is not knowing how essays are structured. Although there are various types of essays out there, they all have at least one thing in common – introduction, main body paragraph(s), and conclusion. Try to get used to this pattern because almost all college-level papers follow it so it makes sense to keep some basic structure in mind while working on new assignments (and develop a habit of doing so).

8) Focusing Too Much on Editing: Although editing is very important, many students focus too much on it while writing an essay. Many of them think they can make their papers better by spending hours in front of the monitor checking every little detail that might be incorrect. While editing your paper is undoubtedly a good idea, you should focus more on improving its quality than just correcting mistakes over and over again. If you don’t take this approach then there’s a big chance that your written work will be unimpressive no matter how attentive you are to the details (since the overall structure needs to be taken into consideration as well).

9) Expecting Perfection: Asking for perfection from yourself is fine but expecting it from your writing is not. The reason why one student can get a better grade than the other even when the latter worked much harder and cared about his/her paper more can be easily explained by the grading system – some students need to make bigger efforts in order to receive higher grades (i.e. they barely meet the criteria required for achieving high marks). This is why you should never expect perfection from yourself because it won’t happen, no matter how hard you try to achieve this goal.

10) Timing: Even though many people think that college essays are supposed to be written at very short notice, this isn’t actually what professors are looking for when evaluating your work. Asking for tight deadlines means giving up on quality which will eventually show in your paper. To avoid this, you can ask for some time to write your essay and indicate that you’re willing to provide your professor with high-quality work but only if they give you enough time to do so (check how many days/weeks they will most likely give you before starting with writing process).

11) Not Reading Professors’ Instructions: It doesn’t matter whether professors ask their students to follow certain requirements or not – it’s still important to read and understand them. Ignoring instructions is one of the worst things a student can do because it shows disrespect towards academic staff and might negatively impact future grades as well. If something in the instructions isn’t clear enough for you then don’t be afraid of asking questions instead of assuming that you will get it right.

12) Not Knowing Your Topic: Without knowing what you’re supposed to write about, writing an essay is virtually impossible (you don’t even know where to start). Before getting started with the process of writing, try to understand what professors want from you and if they give you some hints then pay attention – this can help a lot in making things easier for yourself. This doesn’t mean that you need to read everything your professor left behind before starting working on your paper but at least take a look at them so that you will have a general idea about their expectations and who knows – maybe they gave their students such assignment because it was tested before and turned out to be effective.

13) Copying Instead of Doing Research: Some students think that copying content from other sources without giving credit is good enough to get good grades but this only shows how little they know about academic writing. Unless you’re told to do otherwise, it’s not acceptable to use someone else’s work in your paper – unless of course your professor is okay with this. If you don’t want to take the risk of dealing with plagiarism issues then try using paraphrases instead of quotes and this way you won’t run into any problems.

14) Neglecting Grammar and Spelling: Even though many people think that grammar isn’t important at all, you should still make sure to proofread your paper after completing it because this is the only way of finding out whether you’ve made any mistakes or not. Check if your sentences are in the right order and if they express exactly what you want them to, check if using “I” all the time is a good idea and whether you should use different words instead of repeating the same ones again and again. Other than that, make sure that your paper contains no spelling errors either because even though this doesn’t usually interfere with content grading, it still shows a lack of interest in details which might be a problem.

15) Word Count: Many students try to get away with writing shorter papers by using some shortcuts and tricks but this isn’t a good idea because it only shows how little effort you put into writing. If you want to impress your professor then make sure that you cover all important points in your essay without leaving anything out – you can always expand on some details after getting some feedback from your instructor.

Here are the 15 biggest problems students face when writing essays. Good luck with your essay.