5 Proven Tips For Creating An Outstanding Assignment

Last Updated: 3 January 2024

Creating assignments is something that you have to tackle quite frequently as a student. You have to write a lot of assignments in high school and college, even when you’re pursuing higher education.

If you are looking to make your next assignment really stand out from the rest, here are some tips that you can try out:

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1. Make Sure You Do Proper Research

If when writing your assignment, you need to make sure that you lay a solid foundation for it. In other words, you have to conduct proper research and gather reliable information on which you can structure your entire write-up.

Of course, it has to be remembered that not all assignments require the same level and type of research. For example, if you are tasked with writing, say, a narrative essay, then your research will be a lot different than what you’d have to do for writing a descriptive or explanatory essay.

If we want to condense some best practices for research into a couple of points, here is what it would look like:

Always do your research sometime before the actual writing process. It is not advisable to do your research right at the very moment you have to write the assignment itself. In doing so, you can risk getting too influenced by the research sources, and this can eventually lead you to commit unintentional plagiarism.
When conducting research, you should always establish the bona fides of the sources that you use. Taking information just from anywhere is neither advisable nor beneficial. Normally, you should try and take information from reliable sources like ResearchGate, JSTOR, and Google Scholar.
During your research, always remember to note down the details of the sources which you take information from. These details will be necessary when you will have to create citations later on.

2. Create and Follow a Table of Contents

Creating a table of contents may be a requirement depending on the assignment you’re writing. But, even if it is not, you should still create one since it can be helpful during the writing process itself.

If you are writing something like a report or a research paper, then you may need to create a table of contents for inserting at the start. On the other hand, if you are writing something like an essay, this will not be a requirement.

The benefit of creating a table of contents (even if it is not a requirement) is that you will be able to stay on topic without veering away into something irrelevant. If you follow all the headings and sub-headings as defined by the TOC, you won’t include any last-minute stuff in the assignment, and you won’t have to worry about making the latter look immaterial.

Of course, the last part of this tip depends on not only creating the TOC but also following it meticulously.

3. Use Easy and Simple Wording

Using simple wording in your assignment can make it easier to understand. And when your assignment will be easier to understand, you will stand a better chance of getting a good grade from your teacher.

As a rule, you should refrain from using such words which are not used in common and usual conversation. Where you need to mention something technical, use the least complex terminology you can think of.

The purpose of doing all this is to make your assignment easy for your teacher to go through. If your teacher finds it easy to go through the assignment, they’ll be in a good mood by the time they reach the end. And in a good mood, they will be more likely to give you a good grade.

To show you what we mean by talking about easy words and sentences, here is an example of a linguistic atrocity and a readable bunch of sentences:

“Many individuals holding the position of president in the USA have been surreptitiously killed in history. It is a very much heavy percentage of the total.” (Atrocity)

“The history of the US presidency has seen four assassinations, including that of Garfield, Lincoln, Kennedy, and McKinley. Considering that there has been a total of 46 presidents so far, we can say that around 10% of presidents have been assassinated.” (Somewhat better)

4. Take Care of Plagiarism

Plagiarism can be defined as the process or occurrence of copied content unaccompanied by its citation. In academic settings, plagiarism can be very harmful to the immediate quality of the content, and it can also cause lasting harm to the reputation of the student.

Due to these unsavory consequences, you have to make sure that your assignments contain 0% plagiarism when you submit them.

The “extermination” of plagiarism is usually based on two steps. You first have to find out which parts of the assignments (if any) are plagiarized. And then, you have to move on to either removing the affected parts or taking some other measure to neutralize the plagiarism.

There are different things that you can do for the latter part.

You can, as mentioned above, remove the plagiarized parts altogether.

You can simply put the plagiarized parts in quotation marks to show that they don’t belong to you.
You can also use an online plagiarism remover to make different changes to the content in order to render it unique.

5. Find and Fix Grammar and Spelling Errors

Just as plagiarism can play a destructive role in wrecking your assignment’s integrity, the same goes for grammatical and spelling-related errors.

These two steps, i.e., finding grammar/spelling errors and plagiarism, are both two vital steps that you have to include in your post-writing routine. We’ve discussed plagiarism above, and now we’ll talk about grammar/spelling.

While plagiarism is something that occurs in a somewhat lax chance, grammar and spelling errors can almost always be expected in just about every write-up created by just about any author. Even seasoned veterans can make such errors, which can help us realize the frequency with which they can occur for writers at the student level.

Here is what you can do to find and fix grammar and spelling errors in your assignments:

First off, you should read and re-read your assignment once you finalize the writing process. In doing so, you will be able to find out any errors that you may have initially missed. But, of course, this process is only helpful in finding out the errors that you know about.
There can be some errors that you may commit while not realizing that they are errors, to begin with. To find these out, you can use an online grammar checker instead.

Wrapping Up

The points that we’ve covered in this post pertain to the basic stuff that you have to take care of when writing assignments. If you take care of these aspects, you will be able to secure good grades from your teachers and passively learn how to improve the quality of your write-ups.

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