10 Most Important Tips While Editing Your Essay

Editing is part of all academic writings. Without it, all your efforts can easily fail. Mistakes in an essay, no matter how great the research or story is, can make everyone seem like a bad writer. That being said, editing is often more challenging than writing.

The tips below are perfect for those who struggle with essay editing.

1.Edit and Proofread Separately

Despite what most students think, editing and proofreading is not the same thing. They are both important for the revision process, but require a different approach. Proofreading is more focused on the surface errors such as grammar, spelling, and punctuation. Editing is focused on tone, thought flow, messaging, content, and paragraph structure.

2.Edit Several Times

Creating a second draft is not enough. With each sweep of your content, you’ll find more errors. One great method is to seek for different error types every time you edit the paper. For example, look for typos the first time and follow up with tone on the second edit.

3.Read it Backwards

One highly effective and very popular trick for editing is reading backwards. To make sure that the spelling and punctuation is good, you should read the content from finish to end. This will force you to stop seeing the words as part of a thought. Since you are the one who wrote the essay, you can easily overlook silly mistakes if you read it from start to finish.

4.Get Help

Editing your own work can be impossible. All those writers who hire editors are a proof that you can’t be impartial about your own writing. If you want to edit the paper without a mistake, use companies such as EduBirdie to help you.

5.Change the Essay Format

Sometimes you need a big change to be able to catch the errors. Improvise with different formats. Print out the essay and edit the printed copy, create a different visual representation, etc. You can always go back to the required format when you are done editing.

6.Get Some Distance

Editing right after writing is not a good idea. Give yourself some time distance before you get back to the essay for editing.

7.Use Editing Tools

You can’t rely solely on editing tools because they probably won’t catch all your mistakes, but there are some great apps and programs there that can help out, at least a bit.

8.Check the Paragraphs One By One

Edit one paragraph at a time. Focus on a single paragraph before you move to the next one. Proofread and edit the introduction, then move on to the next paragraph, and so on.

9.Use the Instructions

Read the instructions once again before you edit the paper. This way, you won’t have to do an extra edit just because you missed something.

10.Read the Essay

This is as popular as reading the essay backwards – and it works. Reading the essay out loud will help you hear how it sounds to the reader. This is a perfect way to detect errors and edit the things that sound awkward, as well as remove the unnecessary.

By doing these tricks, you should minimize the time you spend on editing by half. It will also help you edit your papers more effectively.