Common Mistakes Regarding the Writing Process

1. Students often try to shortcut by jumping straight to writing the paper with no brainstorming or other prewriting and planning. This usually costs more time than it saves, not to mention the added frustration.

It's not an altogether invalid way to write, though.  You can remedy any problems of skipping prewriting by going back to it later: as soon as you find yourself stuck or unsure of where you're heading or how to revise your paper.

Go through your paper and underline all your major assertions, or take notes of them (or of your main points from each paragraph) on a seperate sheet of paper.  Since it's hard to read your entire paper, hold the whole thing in your mind at once, and consider how well it's organized, taking these brief notes helps you to reconsider your organization.  If you find one idea repeated throughout the paper, you should probably reorganize so it's only in one spot.

2. Students often focus too heavily on the assignment and not on trying to write effectively.  Even when they know darn well that a paragraph is boring, long, pointless, or otherwise worthy of deletion, they'll do anything to keep from deleting it--afterall (they tell themselves), those words bring them that much closer to completion. 

Hopefully, your goal is not to simply meet the page limit (really the least important part of writing, though important nonetheless) instead of focussing on the requirement of writing a quality paper.  That's what really determines both your grade and, hopefully, your learning.  That's the real value, the real point.   Try to keep it in mind.

3. Students often fail to include enough details to get the point across. Just because the experience or ideas are clear in your own mind does not mean they will immediately be so for your audience. To avoid this, make a list of all the information you know that your paper needs to make sense--even the most obvious points. decide which of these should be included in the paper for your particular audience. Perhaps even more helpful is to get a bit of Peer Response.

4. The most common Logical Fallacy is that of oversimplification. Take a look at each of your assertions and make sure it's 100% true. If it's not, reword or further explain yourself.