When you get into the university, you promise yourself that you will do it right this time. You won’t procrastinate, you will work according to the plan and use only valid academic sources to support your research. Though you are completely sincere in this decision, we often tend to overestimate ourselves. So, the time has come to talk about the most common mistakes in university assignment writing, which you can avoid to make your academic life a bit less stressful.
Do you think too good about yourself?
Positive psychology teaches us that we should think about ourselves always in a good way. That mistakes mostly come from the outside and that any of us is capable of greatness. It is an amazingly supportive thought, the only problem with it is that it is not true. We are not perfect and we tend to overestimate ourselves greatly. We also think that we tomorrow are better than us today, which is of course not true as well. So, next time when you decide to postpone something for tomorrow, ask yourself, who is that mythical creature who will be able to deal with this task tomorrow?
Do you still wait for a Panic Monster?
When we postpone things, we feed the monkey of procrastination. Monkey of procrastination like to play and rest, it likes movies and pizza, and it doesn’t like writing university assignments. When we allow our monkey to control us, we don’t submit papers on time and consequently find ourselves in another argument with a professor. When the deadline approaches many of us are attacked by the Deadline Monster who scares monkey away for some time and we can finish what we’ve started. The problem is, often he appears when nothing quality can be written in the remaining time, and you fail anyway.
Do you ignore academic research platforms?
If you keep looking for materials starting from a simple Google search, you’ve got it all wrong. First, at least use a Google Scholar search. Second, use all the libraries your university has to offer online — most colleges and universities have contracts with online databases and research platform. It means you can use them for free or almost for free.
Do you close your eyes on technical plagiarism?
Technical plagiarism is unintentional, and many students still think that it means “harmless.” Well, it is not. It punished the same as actual plagiarism. If you don’t use the required citation style, don’t cite sources along with the text, only in the bibliography section, if you feel lazy to cite an author every single time you use his or her thought you will finally get caught. So, it is better to write a less creative paper, than to fail in formatting and citing. You can and you should online anti-plagiarism checkers, but you should also remember that academic checkers are different, they look deeper, so the only way to stay on the safe side is to be very careful with your text and sources you use.
Do you think that creativity is key for everything?
Creativity is important, especially when the task itself calls for it. However, it would be a mistake to consider it to be a key to success. First, you should be able to follow the plan, second, you should follow all the requirements given by your professor. Third, you should avoid plagiarism at any cost. Fifth, you should eliminate all grammar and style mistakes. And only after that goes creativity. When you decide to publish a book, creativity will be in the first place. But while you need to work on academic papers, it is important to play by the rules.
Do you ignore professional writing assistance opportunities?
Asking for timely expert assignment writing help is not something bad. You should be open to opportunities, especially in cases of emergency. If you don’t have plan b, if you get sick, or the topic is too challenging, etc, you will have problems graduating. Look for a custom assignment writing service just in case you need professional assistance from academic writers.
Do you neglect to proofread?
Often even university students prefer to write almost till the last hour before the deadline and submit a “raw” paper, with preliminary formatting and some grammar and spelling mistakes. It is a little boring to explain why it is wrong, so just make sure to allocate at least several hours for proofreading. You will be surprised how much better your performance would be if you’ve spent more times looking for mistakes and dealing with them.
Accept the fact that you are not perfect, don’t relax, shoo away your monkey of procrastination and don’t wait for a panic monster to deal with papers for you. Pay enough attention to proofreading, and you will be just fine with your assignments.
