How to Improve Your Technical Essays
It is widely accepted that technical essays are a form of a short academic journal article. These essays typically range from approximately 1,500 to 2,000 words, excluding references. The main purpose of technical essays is to provide information to readers that allows them to understand complex topics through fact-based explanations.
Technical essays are a new addition to the numerous essay types students must learn to construct throughout their academic journey. And while it can be daunting to face a new type of essay that we are not accustomed to, there are always ways to make your technical essays relatively error-free on your first try. Stick with us as we discuss the best ways to improve your technical essays fast.
Table of Contents
What are not technical essays?
Now that we know what technical essays are, it is time to discuss what they don’t encompass. Technical essays, like most academic papers, need to be unbiased when giving information and facts. So, any form of biased, opinionated, and misleading essay is a big NO for technical essays.
Always remain objective and neutral when making technical essays in order to keep the information passed onto the readers as close to the truth as possible. After all, the last thing anyone would want to witness is their “technical” essay receiving a negative remark due to biased, opinionated, and misleading content.
How to improve writing technical essays?
After clearing out the toughest hurdle of defining what technical essays are and aren’t, it is high time we talk about ways to improve your technical essays fast.
1. Focus primarily on the structure
Any form of essay is like a house that you build piece by piece, carefully placing more and more content along with the foundations of the house. Without this foundation, the pieces and parts would be misaligned and weak, and the entire house would fall apart.
The foundation of any good technical essay is clarity in the structure of the essay. Try to set aside all the information you are itching to include in your essay and focus on the bigger picture first in order to build a good foundation for your technical essay.
You can opt to make a rough outline first of how you want your ideas to flow in your technical essay. After you have decided on the structure and flow of your essay, you can start to add bits and pieces of information that fit the flow you want to emanate. This creates cohesion within the parts of your technical essay and helps you spot redundant parts or parts that don’t fit too neatly into the general structure.
2. Make it reader-friendly
Oftentimes, students mistake the general approach of technical essays and make their essays sound too formal or include too many scientific terms and jargon, just because a technical paper is considered an academic paper. Including the appropriate terms and jargon in certain fields is truly helpful; however, never let it be too overbearing.
The main goal of a technical essay is to inform readers about certain complex topics so that even those who don’t delve too much into a certain field of study can understand. But when you bombard readers with an unreasonable number of jargon and scientific terms to make your essay seem more intellectual, then chances are that some parts of your technical essay will fail to educate and inform your readers.
Also, make sure to properly explain and expand what the contents of your citations are to ensure that even readers without prior knowledge of the topic can understand what they are reading. You wouldn’t want to read an essay that looks like it was pulled straight from Wikipedia, and neither will your reader.
3. Keep it consistent
Consistency, like a proper structure, plays a major role in making your technical essays flow smoothly and cohesively. It makes sure that your readers know what you are referring to without having to go back a few sentences just to understand what you want to convey.
Consistency with regard to your verb tenses, as well as how you refer to your subjects, is what you need to look out for when making a technical essay.
Once you start using the past tense of a verb in your technical essay, you should follow that verb tense throughout the entirety of your essay. The same applies to your subjects; if you refer to them as ‘individuals’, then it should be clear that the term individuals is reserved for your subjects.
4. Get straight to the point
While it can be tempting to add fillers and include vivid, yet unnecessary details in your technical essays to reach the minimum number of words your professors set, it will often lead to a bulky but hollow essay.
It is often better to get to the main points of the technical essay as logically possible to have more room to explain and elaborate on the main points, rather than drawing out the introduction longer than it should be.
Getting straight to the point helps avoid boring the readers and keeps them engaged since the information that they want to know is given to them as quickly as possible. This doesn’t necessarily mean that descriptions and introductions should be completely neglected; they just need to not be drawn out so as not to overshadow the main points of your technical essay.
5. Don’t include personal biases
Another mistake that often pops up when making technical essays is trying too hard to persuade the readers into believing the facts and conclusions you have presented to them. It is understandable since most of us are used to creating persuasive or argumentative essays back in secondary school. However, this is not the case for technical essays.
Technical essays need to be unbiased, neutral, and objective in nature since the primary goal of this academic paper is to inform and educate. You are simply there to give bite-sized, easy-to-digest pieces of information about complex topics to make it easier for the reader to understand the said complex topic.
Biases often undermine the main purpose of technical essays, which is why it is better to rid your paper of biases to make sure that the readers get the most out of your technical essay.
6. Don’t forget the basics
This last one may seem obvious at first glance, but there are numerous occasions where grammatical rules and proper punctuation are often forgotten due to the sheer amount of information we eagerly want to include in our technical essay.
Always remember to double-check your grammar and use the appropriate punctuation marks for the sentences you are constructing. Neglecting these aspects of your technical essay may hinder the reader’s absorption of information since they have to piece together what you mean.
Conclusion
There is no shame in not excelling at something on your first try; what’s important is that you try to get better at it and not run away from the challenge. Masters are not born, rather, they are made. So, take your time to practice making a few drafts while observing the tips stated above, have fun with it, and you should be able to make a reasonably well-made technical essay eventually.
Carelle
Carelle is a teacher who has been through the ups and downs of the teacher and learner life. She wishes for every learner to gain educational satisfaction that will help embody the people they want to be in the future.
