How to Edit Your Essay

Publication Date: 13 Oct 2017
Author: Julia Stuart

Except numerous tasks, which require writing, you definitely will face the necessity of editing your essay or paper. It is an inevitable part of refining your work and making it perfect. Editing is a complicated task, which requires numerous skills, knowledge and attention. However, skills of editing can be very useful at any stage of your life. Correct style and right spelling bring excellent marks at school and college, improving speeches or reports is a frequent activity, which provides success and acknowledgement at work. Thus, this skill is definitely worth mastering.

A lot of us ignore editing, since it takes additional time. Yes, it takes a lot of time and it is an unquestionable fact. But we often do not notice our errors and misspellings, which leads to unpleasant results. Even the most attentive people can make mistakes in grammar or punctuation, especially when they are full of inspiration and pay more attention to the content. Do not be lazy and edit your assignments, the sound perfectionism developing will make you more successful.

Comprehensive Process of Editing

Editing represents not only the process of rereading and correction of grammar mistakes. It is very narrow definition of this process. In fact, this activity includes many aspects and directions. Let’s outline the most important of them.

• editing of the content from the grammar point of view (correcting all sorts of mistakes and misspellings, checking the usage of the punctuation signs);
• stylistic review of the paper (your topic presupposes usage of certain style and narrative manner, which should be followed throughout the whole paper);
• validation of the content consistency with the declared topic (it is very common for students to distract on other things and as a result they often do not manage to uncover the assigned topic).

Thus, when starting the editing procedure, you need to realize what you need to check and, for sure, to be aware of all requirements to the essay. When you know what paper should be delivered as an outcome, than you can perform its correct validation.

Basic Scheme for Editing

1. Try to view the essay as you have never seen it before. Pay attention to those mistakes, which will make reading of your paper unpleasant. Find tautology and replace the repeating words with the synonyms, check spelling of the worlds. Pay attention to syntax, especially in regard to long sentences. It is very simple to omit a comma there or use incorrect sentence structure.
2. Focus your attention on the style. Here everything depends on the topic. If it is some literary essay, you need to stick to sophisticated language and elevated manner of narration. If the essay is directed on expression of your opinion and has rather philosophical topic, you can feel less restricted and even use colloquial phrases, but everything is good in a mass.
3. Make sure that the topic is totally uncovered and considered. Thus, if you need to tell about some famous book, it will be inappropriate to describe its movie version without any mentioning of the book.
4. Make breaks while editing, so that you can be more attentive and analyze the content with the fresh and objective view.

You can edit on your own or ask your friend to review your think piece. Improve your skills in editing and writing and great achievements will be not long in coming.