Most learners wish to use self-editing to determine the success of their essays and other assignments. In this way, they do not have to ask their friends or family members to hurry up and help with essay editing and proofreading. What’s more, doing the editing themselves saves them money they would otherwise spend on hiring these services. Whether you believe in the power of getting an extra pair of eyeballs on your draft or not, this blog post will give you insider tips on how to edit your paper to perfection. So, let’s make your lecturer fall in love with your rigor and commitment.
Get Busy in Other Activities
When we were in school, we had to prepare for exams, and exams were time-constrained. To cope with the limited time given to attempt the exam, we had to learn to edit our work in the same sitting as we completed it. Because of that, we learned to edit our essays on the spot.
While you will benefit from your habit of instantly editing your essays in your college and university exams, this habit will hurt you immensely when you have to complete your essay writing assignments. These assignments come with an extended deadline for a reason: to allow enough time for research, writing, and editing. You need to use this time well to score perfect grades. Complete your draft early with proper research and leave it to rest for some time before revisiting it for revision.
Leaving your draft after you have completed it allows you to forget your mental and emotional connection with it. Once your brain has forgotten how you processed the ideas and put them on paper, it can look at the piece with a fresh perspective.
Improve It for Flow
You want your essay to make sense to the readers. One way to do so is by presenting ideas logically. You will want to connect ideas and present them near to each other. Reading the whole passage in one sitting after taking a break from your essay is the best way to find out if you need to develop the structure of your essay to improve it. Also, you will want to add transitional phrases to improve the readability of your essay.
Ask a Junior to Read Your Essay for You
You will want to seek help from a person who doesn’t understand the topic you have covered in your essay. This way, the person will get introduced to the topic through your essay and will need an explanation for every sentence.
If your reader can understand the topic without additional help, it means that you have made your essay readable and easy to comprehend. On the other hand, reader’s questions about certain sentences will show you where your essay demands more clarity. After getting an opinion from a junior, you will want to edit it again for structural consistency and logical flow.
Get Help from Technology
You must have heard the advice to not use grammar-checking tools because they aren’t accurate. Tweak this counsel a little bit. It should prevent you from relying on grammar-checking tools without a reasonable knowledge and understanding of grammatical rules.
To the fair, these tools are quite adequate and help many students in their essay writing assignments. The only problem is that they can only detect basic level of mistakes including spelling mistakes and errors in sentence structures. You cannot expect to make your entire essay free of error and more readable with these tools. Also, these tools will do more harm than good if you don’t know the grammatical rules yourself.
Read Aloud
Don’t let your brain trick you into thinking that you wrote an impeccable essay. Question every choice of word you have made while writing it. This questioning and analysis will force your brain to awaken your inner critique, and you understand the purpose of your inner critic, right? It will rip apart every sentence and will tell you what you keep missing in it. In the end, you will easily find flaws in your writing to improve them.
Even if your inner critic isn’t strong enough to give you suggestions on your word choice, it will surely dissect your essay’s sentences for possible grammatical and structural errors. Use your understanding of the writing language and improve your essay.
Hire Professional Essay Editing Services
If you are a non-native English speaker, you will have to put in more effort in learning English essay writing than your native counterparts. One essential step to build your English writing proficiency is to get professional essay editing and proofreading help from professionals and track their changes and suggestions closely. These changes will tell you your flaws in grammar and syntax allowing you to improve.
At the same time, getting these services will ensure that you will get reasonable grades in your essay and don’t lose marks only because of poor writing quality. You can get two different types of essay editing services including developmental editing and line editing. Most non-native speakers will make line editing a must in their editing help because it highlights errors in sentences.
Note that hiring essay editing help is not for non-native speakers only, native speakers also benefit from these immensely especially when they try to build their writing muscle. And if you are confident in your writing skills, don’t overlook the prospect of hiring this help especially when your assignment marks are at stake. Assignment writers can provide expert guidance, ensuring that your work meets academic standards and improves your chances of success
Learn from the Feedback
While most of the editing tips we discussed above will help you improve your essay immediately, this hack will help you refine your writing skills for future tasks. Surely, you don’t want to only present one impeccable essay, would you? If you want consistent results, you need to see beyond the marks you get on your essay.
When you get your essay back from your instructor, study it closely to see how they have improved it. The highlighted technical mistakes in your essay will help you learn the subject for which you wrote the essay. At the same time, if your instructor highlights grammatical mistakes, it will be your opportunity to polish your language skills.
Final Thoughts
This blog post talks about some essay editing and proofreading tips. Most of these tips will help you instantly better your essay so it’s ready for submission. However, the last one encourages you to sharpen your editing skills in general.
