Productivity

Grammar, Style, & Structure: Beyond Grammarly

Grammar, Style, & Structure: Beyond Grammarly
What constitutes good writing in English? What makes a good writer stand out from an okay writer? What will earn highest grades when writing essays for school? 

What can help test-takers get the highest points on English aptitude tests? 

The answer to all of these questions includes: content, style, structure, and mechanics. So what are those?

These four elements - content, style, structure, and mechanics - work hand in hand in any piece of writing to determine its excellence of articulation and expression.

So what does that mean?

Content:
Content refers to the ideas that you write about. For school or test writing, this generally requires some aspect of critical thinking. Show how much you know about the topic at hand. 

Are you repeating the same idea again and again, or do you have a sophisticated understanding of the material? How accurate are you? Do you have enough examples? 

Is your writing specific enough? Have you shown all sides to a debate? Have you researched?

Style:
Style refers to your writing style, which includes things such as tone and diction. Writing style differs from genre to genre. What is expected of a horror novel is different from what is expected in a scholarly essay. 

The way we write in a text to our friends is different from our academic essay for school. What I might say in a funny tweet will be expressed quite differently in an essay. 

All of these different ways of writing refer to different writing styles. Are you formal enough in your writing? Is your diction elevated sufficiently?

Structure:
Structure is often referred to as organization as well. It implies the organizing principle to your piece of writing. For scholarly writing, you want to ensure that your ideas flow logically one to the other, with each concept building on the logical premise that has been structured before it. 

You want transitions between ideas, and you want to make sure that your over-all argument stays on track and doesn't meander.

Mechanics:
The mechanics of writing refer to proper use of grammatical and punctuation conventions. In short, are you correct or wrong in your placement of punctuation and your use of words. 

Have you shifted verb tenses inadvertently? Is there a subject-language agreement problem? Are there sentence fragments or run-on sentences? Does the writing show faulty parallelism or other syntactical errors?

Luckily, the world of academic writing has been opened up in some really exciting ways by tools out there to help writers master these four pillars of writing.

There are online tools to help with content acquisition and polishing final prose, and we, of course, recommend Grammarly. 

Many of these tools can be integrated easily with Microsoft Word or Google Docs, both of which are still the leaders in word processing software. 

One important thing to remember is that often you might think that what holds your writing back is poor grammar or punctuation, but really it's more often that what might prevent the clearest articulation of your ideas is not having a good, logical flow of thought. 

Content, Organization, Style, and Mechanics all work together to make sure that you present a logically flowing argument in your writing.

So don't just focus on the spelling and grammar part of things and ignore the logical progression of your ideas.

Read more on writing:
1.) Our post on essay-writing services
2.) Tips for writing online exams (writing ones and other subjects too!)
3.) How to Ace your essay exams

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