This One Trick Will Help Boost Your Essay Grades

If you hate writing essays, but you want easy A’s, I have a trick for you. 

I’ve taught college-level writing in many capacities, but more importantly, I know how professors think. So I’m going to tell you how you can spend less time writing your essays while earning even better grades.

And if you want help earning college credit quickly and inexpensively so you can build a career you love, sign up for a consultation. 

When professors grade essays, they look for four things:

#1. Good ideas

#2. Good grammar

#3. Good formatting 

…and that’s where most professors think they stop grading. As long as a paper checks those three boxes, it’s good, right? 

Wrong! #4 is called signposting, and if your paper doesn’t have it, you’re screwed. 

Let me explain:

Basically, thinking is hard work. And if thinking is to the brain what running is to the legs, then grading essays is like running a marathon at a dead sprint.

A very boring marathon, at that.

And the brain, like your body, has an instinct built into it to avoid hard work. (Don’t deny it!) Your caveman brain wants to preserve energy in case you need to do something like escape from a saber tooth tiger or jump across a river.

So when your professor sits down to grade 30 essays that are 7 pages each, their brain says, “This is stupid. We’re not getting food or shelter out of this. We’re literally reading papers about the same topic over and over. I’m bored, and we’re wasting all our tiger-escaping calories.” 

This is where signposting comes in. 

Essentially, signposting is about making it really easy for your professor’s brain to quickly see what you’re writing about so they know you’re doing it right.  

Let me show you an example: 

<The audacity of such a presupposition could lead to a major misunderstanding about the collegiate principles that need to be respected in the case of credit-bearing educational attempts. If one is too generous in one’s assigning of credentials in cases of transfer evaluations, it could lead to a questioning of reputation and even overall harm to an institution. The long-term effects could be damaging to both students and faculty in the learning economy we operate within.>

Was that painful to read or what? If you had to read 210 pages like that every week, you’d be grumpy too. 

Now read this second paragraph: 

<Transfer credit flexibility is useful, but schools need to have careful standards. If colleges accept every transfer credit they receive, it could be a sign that the college has too low of standards. In the long-term, this could mean the school loses accreditation or reputation. But a college can protect their degrees with well-reasoned standards.>

Now imagine you’re a professor in charge of grading 210 pages worth of essays. If those 210 pages are like the first paragraph, are you giving good grades? The information is the exact same and the grammar is perfect in each. 

Admit it: the second paragraph will get a better grade if only because you understood it more easily.

So how do we signpost? 

2. Send good signals with the words we choose.

The second paragraph made really good signals. What words kept appearing? “Transfer credit,” “college,” and “standards.” Guess what that paragraph is about? College’s standards for transfer credits. There’s no guessing. Even if someone skims this paragraph, they know what it’s about because those words are repeated.

2. Make the first sentence extremely clear. 

The first sentence of a paragraph is often called the topic sentence or controlling sentence. You need to use keywords there and accurately show what the entire paragraph is going to be about. Some professors (and students for that matter) only read the first sentences of paragraphs (unless the first sentences are really bad, in which case they often decide to scrutinize more). The first sentence of the first paragraph is an excellent controlling sentence because it contains keywords and explains what the paragraph is going to be about. 

3. Use simple, easy words.

Larger, more obscure words take more brain calories to process. Smaller words let the brain fly. Obviously, you still need to use the appropriate words for your topic, and, in academic writing, many of those are big. But don’t use a big word when you could just as well use a small word. 

4. Use short sentences (some of the time).

You don’t want every sentence to be five words long, but if your sentences are all three lines long, you’re scaring your professor’s brain and not being as concise as you could. Cut out unnecessary fluff and split a few sentences in half. Aim for about half short sentences and half medium length sentences. 

5. No page-long paragraphs. 

Huge paragraphs mean longer stretches between controlling sentences, which turns what should be a sprint from paragraph to paragraph into a marathon. Your professor’s brain wants that controlling sentence signpost so they can take a breather and feel like your paper is still going in the right direction. If you’re writing only huge paragraphs, reading becomes more difficult. 

6. Less is more. 

If you’re ever tempted to write waaaaay over the wordcount, don’t do it. In the first place, concise writing is better writing. In the second, professors aren’t fans of reading ten-page papers when the assignment was for a five-page paper. That’s a lot of extra work. And, a little industry secret here: they don’t get paid more for grading longer papers. ;) 

_______

I want to leave you with a dirty secret of the industry: lots of professors don’t read every word. Many of them skim papers. And who can blame them? Grading is an awful, miserable job. And once your professor starts skimming, they’re just looking for keywords from the prompt or rubric to make sure you’re on track. The clearer and more prominent you can make those keywords, the better off you’ll be.

If you’re not signposting, your professor is getting frustrated, wondering if you paid attention to the prompt, and looking for ways to mark you down. Their subconscious is telling them that you went off topic. 

When you signpost, you help a frustrated, bored, and tired brain make sense of your essay, which makes your paper easy to read. The human brain thinks easy is good, so that means your paper is good. And that makes your grade good, too.

I hope this helped! And if you’d like College Hacked to help you plan a college degree so you can graduate for under $4,000 and in under 18 months, sign up for a consultation, and we’ll help you graduate quickly and inexpensively so you can build a career you love.