Editing your research paper or scientific article is not as easy as writing it. Surprised? In fact, almost 90% of students proofread and edit their papers in the most inefficient way possible. And what about you? Do you know how to revise and edit an essay or a paper correctly?
If you have an essay, which has to be proofread now, keep reading. We’re going to reveal a couple of secrets of how to do it in the best way possible without losing a minute. In case you need a paper by tomorrow, but you haven’t done at least something yet, click here now to get a professional writing and editing assistance from a team of qualified writers.
So, let’s have a look at how to improve your essay content by editing it properly.
Proofread and Edit like a Pro
Let’s imagine that you’ve already created the first draft of your paper and you need some feedback on how to improve it and which direction should you move with your research further. So, here’s what you have to do.
● Read your paper. On the Internet, you can find a piece of advice about giving your work to someone else to proofread it for you. We don’t recommend doing it as the first step of a revision process. First of all, you have to read your paper yourself. Even if you have already written countless research papers and think that you can’t objectively evaluate your own writing, read by yourself before asking your friends or teachers to proofread it as well. Usually, there are a lot of technical, big mistakes that can make you look a little bit silly if not improving them by yourself. This doesn’t mean you have to be ashamed of your mistakes. No, everyone does them. But you have to be ashamed of not improving them because of not paying enough attention to your work.
● While editing check whether all of the paragraphs are indented and all sentences end with periods and start with capital letters. These are just very noticeable technical mistakes, which can’t be missed in any academic paper.
● Then, check the citations. Are the citations formatted correctly? Check the requirements provided by your teacher or university.
● Check the formatting in general. Does the whole paper, including the title page correspond to the requirements provided by your teacher?
● Check whether the purpose of your essay is achieved. Usually, there are three types of essay goals – to describe, persuade, or entertain. Check if one of those goals is achieved. If it is a research paper, check whether the result of the research corresponds to the goals of it provided in the introduction. Is the research profound enough?
● Make sure that your ideas are clearly expressed reasonably. Is each paragraph connected to the next one with the help of a transition sentence? Can you clearly distinguish the thesis statement, which is the main point of your essay? A thesis statement should be placed at the end of the first paragraph.
● Once you’ve proofread and edited a paper on your own, you can give it to your friend or parents or a teacher to proofread it for you too. Don’t ask for actual changes in your paper. Ask for their suggestions only. Thus, you will compare your ideas and their ideas and find out what’s better. Giving your paper to someone else to read it for you aloud one more time can really help to check whether it sounds smooth or not. It is difficult to notice that even if you read it out loud by yourself. So, revising with a friend is always a good idea.
● Proofread your essay after a couple of days you’ve finished the writing process. If you give your brain time to rest between writing and editing, you get higher chances to see what has to be added to or deleted from the paper faster. For example, write your paper, leave it for two-three days, and then revise it. Then, leave it again for three-four days and proofread one more time.
And the last but not the least, don’t write and proofread simultaneously. If you want to work as efficiently as possible, don’t write and edit at the same time. It is better to compose a paper and proofread it later to see the whole picture. If you edit while writing you risk losing the main idea of the work. And definitely, you will spend more time on writing and proofreading at a time than writing and proofreading step-by-step. And it is relatively easy to check your paper if you divide this process into several parts – looking for grammar errors, looking for spelling errors, and looking for punctuation errors.
Hopefully, these small recommendations will help to make your essay editing process a lot easier and faster.
