Being a college student often means juggling many responsibilities in various areas of your life -- as a student, participant in extracurricular activities, employee, family member and friend. The 2010 U.S. Census determined that approximately one third of the 14.4 million full-time college students work part time, while 13 percent are employed full time.
Since there is a limited amount of time in a day, time spent writing an essay is time not spent studying for a test or sitting down to a relaxing meal with your family. Feeling the time crunch can lead students to rush through a writing assignment, or to submit your first draft rather than taking the time to vigilantly revise. However, doing thorough research, writing with care and taking the time to revise can make a big difference in your grade.
Many great writers have been thwarted by poorly chosen subjects. You will often choose your own topic (or at least focus within a set of topics) when writing academically. This can lead to several problems, including choosing a topic that interests you but on which there is little research, selecting a topic that is too broad to research effectively or focusing the topic so narrowly it is difficult to find multiple academic sources discussing it.
Brainstorming, typically done by jotting down a list, about your potential topics is an effective way to assure you've made a good choice. You'll want to assure you can select a handful of search phrases during research and fill in an outline noting a few main points about your topic prior to writing the essay.
Good research takes time. Without valid, timely, relevant research, most essays cannot succeed. Rather than using an Internet search engine and hoping to happen on to a website related to the material, research time is better spent using electronic library databases (typically available on the college's library website or in the library itself) for academic articles. In addition to assuring all research is credible and factual, it should be up-to-date -- for scientific or medical information, this means finding more recent information than when looking for the historical context of a political issue -- but your instructor or a library can help you select the time frame to which you should narrow your search.
It's true that when you submit your essay, you have a captive audience (because your instructor has to grade it, whether she finds it interesting or not). However, that should be motivation to make the text more interesting, rather than submitting what ends up reading like a summary-based synthesis of your research.
While academic writing is considered a more formal, structured type of writing than writing for pleasure creatively or in blogs, this doesn't mean the content needs to be boring. A quality essay engages readers with a striking attention-getter to begin the introduction, a clear thesis statement, valid and relevant evidence supporting interesting points throughout the text and by calling the audience to action in the conclusion.