When you decide to write a college paper, you need to consider the importance of using the right kind of words in order to convey the best possible message. In this article we are going to talk about the words and phrases that you need to avoid in order to get the best grade in your college paper.
Keep in mind that there are some exceptions to these rules, but they apply to 99% of the papers that are assigned in college.
Prove
The main reason why you need to avoid this in any paper is because even if you do plenty of research, you are never really going to have proof of anything. You can create arguments that have enough useful information to be persuasive, but you are never going to be able to get full proof in most cases, so you really need to avoid using this word.
Hope
This word in any of its forms (hopeful, hopefully, hope, hoping) is not going to give you any extra points and might lower your grade instead of being useful. When you are doing research, you aim and intend to get results, but you should never be hoping for thing with your research. You need to be assertive and you have to forget that this word exists for the duration of your paper if you want optimal results from this.
Ensure
The word ensure means that something will be certain. This is the reason why you need to avoid the use of the word in your paper unless you have a sentence in which it will make perfect sense. There are very few things that can be ensured and this is the main reason why you should avoid the work when you are doing are presenting the results of your research.
A lot
This is one of the biggest mistakes that is made by writers and it will definitely lower your score on a paper. You should never use this combination of words on your paper. You can replace it with “a great deal of” or “many, much”. A lot is not really a way to describe quantity or to talk about a large number of people.
You and Your
This might seem like too common of a word no to use it at least a few times in a paper, but it should never be used in your research papers. When you write a paper, you are not making this document for a particular person, you are not supposed to be making a paper for your teacher.
You are making a paper for the entire research community and this means that you should always make this paper in a way that is will address everyone.
We
This should never be write in a research paper either because you are providing research based on individual research. So unless you have been given a paper to write with a team, you should always avoid the word “we”.
Avoid the contractions
If there is one mistake that can give you a low grade on your paper, it would probably be the use of contractions. For those who might be wondering what a contraction is, although, no one who plans to attend college should ignore the meaning.
A contraction is an abbreviated version of a single word or a group of words. We use them all the time in all kinds of situations when we speak but in writing, they are just too informal for anyone to use them on a research paper.
- Example of the use of a contraction:
Most people don’t like to eat vegetables - How to write it properly for a paper:
Most people do not like to eat vegetables
This is a fairly easy thing to avoid as long as you are aware of the proper way to write. Most people now contractions quite well because they use them when they speak all the time, but they have no place in any kind of serious writing.
Conclusion
These are some of the most important words and phrases to avoid using in college papers. If you follow this advice, you will be able to get a good grade on your paper. This will also depend on your ability to provide a paper that has been properly researched and uses proper punctuation and structure.
Hopefully you will find this article useful for the large number of papers that you are going to have before you graduate from college.