Words to Avoid When Writing an Essay

Writing Argumentative essays are often difficult and time-consuming. These essays are used to persuade the readers about a certain viewpoint of the writer. While words can be a powerful tool to express your outlook on a matter and convince the audience, it can be very difficult to avoid some commonly used words that don't contribute to your essay and make them look amateurish. This article gives you an idea about such words which can be used as a reasonable essay help to improve your writing.

Words and Phrases you should Avoid in Your Essay

Informal Contractions

While writing expository essays, avoid contractions such as "don't," "won't," and "can't." These contractions give the essay an overall informal or casual tone which is not optimal for academic essays. Use full words instead like "will not," "do not," and "can not."

Irrelevant Phrases

Phrases that have lost their relevance in contemporary written English, must be avoided. These can seem to the professor as a poor attempt to appear like a clever person. Also, these words sound unnecessarily weighty, cliche and garrulous. Examples include:

• It is an open secret...

• We all know that...

• Sleep like a baby...

Slang and SMS language

This is a no brainer that you should not use any slang terms in your essays. Also, avoid using teen-speak, internet abbreviation and SMS language in your argumentative essays quickly. This way you can maintain the formal attitude of the academic paper. These words include:

• Coz (because)

• IRL (in real life)

Jargon

Jargons and technical words may be appropriate for the experts in the field. But, to make the writing understandable and acceptable to the intelligent layman you must avoid jargon at all costs.

Misused passive voice

Most academic essay writers in our essay help service, advise students to avoid using the passive voice because they often misuse them. You need to know that the passive voice has its own disadvantages for the grammatical construction it has. Passive voice sentences lack specific reference to the actor and hence weaken wiring. Use active voice most of the time to increase the readability and clarity of your sentences.

Connector words that make you sound unconfident

The use of connector words can be tough in argumentative essays as they are often redundant and weak modifiers for a sentence. Examples of this kind of Words will be:

• Very

• Quite

• Really

• Totally

• Simply

• Just

• Actually

Beat the temptation to insert them in your essay. These words have no contribution to an efficient academic essay. Do not compromise the quality just to meet the word count of the essay.

Colloquially used vague words

Some words can be identified as vague words and their colloquial use makes them unsuitable for academic argumentative essays. These words can include:

• Thing ( The thing is...) 

• Stuff

• Matter

• Good - Bad

• Big - Small

Using these words can make your professor think that you have a poor vocabulary. So, try to avoid these words and write more sophisticated words in your academic papers. Use thesaurus for finding suitable synonyms.

Parenthetic words

These words similar to connector words do not provide any added value to your argumentative essays and just become redundant. Avoid these words whenever you can:

• In terms of

• In order to

• Needless to say

• In conclusion

• It goes without Saying

Continuity words

Words used for indicating continuity often don't have to do anything with the content of the argumentative essays. Conversely, they might present your ineptitude to handle arguments, details and provide examples. These are some of the examples:

• So on...

• etc.

• so forth...