Many students still turn in papers with spelling errors. This is partly due to students' misplaced trust in spell-check programs. If you are one of those people who just can't spell, have someone proofread for you. Spell-check programs will not tell you that you've made an error if you use "their" instead of "there." Mechanics concern proper capitalization, font use, punctuation and appropriate formatting.
Grammar concerns the parts of a sentence, sentence structure and usage. Most people have internalized much of English grammar by the time they reach upper grade levels, but the daily speech patterns that they pick up from family and friends acclimate them to accept ungrammatical language. You need to refresh yourself on the definition of a sentence, independent and dependent clauses, a subject, a verb and object. From there, relearning grammar is less daunting.
To write well, you must be logical. It helps to learn common fallacies, such as appealing to emotion and arguing ad hominem, which is the assumption that a person's worth or the validity of his beliefs and statements are invalid because of who she is. For example, to dismiss someone's opinion because of gender, race or even a bad reputation is to commit the ad hominem fallacy. Fallacies erode not only logical thinking, but the truth of what you say.
Organization refers to holistic and paragraph level organization; that is, the sentences inside a paragraph should follow smoothly and logically from one another, and paragraphs should do the same. A poorly organized paper reads chaotically, and as a result, the reader has a hard time following what you are trying to say.
Development concerns intellectual follow-through and support. You must fully explore your main ideas, and you must offer objective evidence that supports what you say. Equally important, if you construct an argument, include conflicting evidence and important counter arguments, even if you are going to prove them invalid. If you construct an argument that ignores significant counter-arguments, you diminish the likelihood that you will convince your reader, you leave your own argument open to attack, and your instructor may say that your reasoning is unsound or that you haven't taken the time to learn the facts.
Written communication also requires the writer to fully discuss the topic and its subtopics without assuming the reader will know what the writer is talking about. You must fill in informational and grammatical gaps.
Before you can write well, you must learn to read critically. If you don't, you can't evaluate the sources from which you will draw support. The fact that something is printed on a page or website does not mean that it is correct or true.
Research skills follow from critical reading and entail maintaining both a skeptical mind and an open mind. You must always ask yourself how the writer or speaker arrived at a conclusion and evaluate the person's evidence. A skeptical mind will help you to do so. An open mind will help you to accept that some of your preconceived ideas are incorrect. Additionally, you must learn where to find credible sources.
Citing all your sources will prevent you from plagiarizing, but in addition, citing sources helps the reader to pursue further investigation, a critical aspect of societal knowledge building. Two types of citations are common -- in-text citations and bibliographic citations. You will use both for any given research paper. Different disciplines use different citation styles. Your instructor will tell you which style to use and will probably tell you where to find related formatting information.
Most people cannot write a competent essay in less than three drafts -- a rough draft in which you hash out the bulk of the paper, a second draft in which you reorganize and add information, and a third draft in which you polish the essay, making sure that it reads well and is error free. The two most effective techniques to proofread the final copy include printing it out to read from a hard copy and reading it aloud. You will catch a multitude of errors that you will not see on the screen.