Don’t ever hand in your first draft of the essay to your teacher. Most essays contain mistakes and errors that must be fixed after completion. It means you need to edit your essay well before submitting it. An edited essay does not contain basic issues of language and grammar. It has the potential to get you an A grade. However, what do most students do? They just do not bother and submit essays without properly editing them.
In our opinion, this happens because of the student’s lack of knowledge about editing an essay. If you are also a student who does not know how to edit his essay, then you have come to the right place. In today’s article, we will discuss the ways using which you can edit your essay. However, before that, let’s define the term editing.
What does it mean to edit an essay?
Editing an essay means checking the essay for its tone, structure, and overall flow of information. Many students confuse it with proofreading. It is a lot different from traditional proofreading, where you only look for typos, spelling, and minor grammatical issues. While editing the essay, you look for the bigger mistakes, like the mistakes in the structure of a sentence that is changing its meaning to a lot extent. Hence, this is what it means to edit your essay and how it is different from proofreading.
Expert advice to edit your essay
After reading the information above, you know what it means to edit an essay. However, the main topic of today’s discussion is to explain how you can edit the essay in the right way. To explain this, we interviewed the top essay editors and noted their views. Now, we are going to list down their common pieces of advice. Hence, a brief description of all the pieces of advice is as follows:
Read the whole essay
The first and most important tip given by experts is to read the whole essay once. As the writer of the essay, when you go through the essay once, you start seeing your mistakes in it. Whenever you spot a mistake while reading the essay, make sure that you underline it. At this point of editing, there is no need to take immediate modifications. Just go through all the lines of the essay and underline the line where you feel any flaw.
Read the essay backward
Reading backward does not mean reading each line and text backward. By doing this, you will not be able to understand the meaning of your sentences. What we mean by saying that you should read the essay backward is to take a sentence at a time. Take it, read it, and try to understand its meaning. This will force you to look closer at the words used in the essay and also help you better recognition of the flaws in your essay.
Change the format
Sometimes, your brain works very well when you take a look at the same thing in a changed form. If you have written the essay on the computer, take out its print. Print it so that you can have a hard copy of it in front of you. Once you have the hard copy, start reading it and begin spotting the errors and omissions in it. When you are reading the essay, you can use different colour markers to edit your essay.
Give yourself some time
As you have not written the whole essay in one go, it is always recommended that you should not edit the essay in one go. When you try to edit the essay in one sitting, you actually tire yourself a lot that you start missing the important mistakes. Therefore, the experts say that you must give yourself time while you edit your essay. It means you should take a few short breaks during the editing process and then come back with a fresh mind. You can also get help from someone or buy essay online from an expert writer if no one can help you.
Examine each paragraph of the essay
The last piece of advice from experts is that you should examine each paragraph of your essay. See if your paragraphs are fully developed. Look for any missing things in your paragraphs, like an example about the topic is missing or a fact you know is missing. There could be dozens of things like that. So, examine the essay paragraphs and edit them properly and make the ideas in them flow smoothly.
Conclusion
To sum up, editing your essay is a quick way to look for errors in it and rectify those errors. Often students just go through the essay, correct some misspelled words, and get done with editing. This is no true editing. True editing is to maintain a consistent tone and flow of ideas. Therefore, we have discussed the top 5 pieces of advice given by experts to edit your essay. So, read them and follow them when you start editing your essay.
