While editing is an essential part of academic writing, it is still underestimated by the students. Not editing your essay thoroughly leaves major issues unsolved in your essay and makes your writing skills questionable. Therefore, it must be your utmost consideration to edit your work thoroughly regardless of any types of essay. However, editing is a highly skilled job and therefore must be accomplished using the most trusted methods. It is a culmination of two major tasks: (1) Revising and (2) Proofreading. So I will be demonstrating you step-by-step methods to edit your work using these two important techniques.
How to Start?
Get a hard copy of the essay to better focus on the existing mistakes and edit your work effectively. This will help you get your attention to both major and minor errors that you would have overlooked on a screen. Firstly you have to read the whole essay in order to understand its organisation, style and flow and then highlight the existing mistakes. This will indicate you the portions of text that need to be revised.
Revising
Revising is the first step to edit a document. Look out for distorted or out-of-context portions of text and try rewording or reordering them on a different paper. Check the style and flow of your essay and figure out any part that sounds inconsistent or unnatural. Use suitable transitional words between paragraphs and sentences to bring in consistency and flow in writing. If you are editing another person’s work, be sure to edit it in such a way that does not change the whole meaning of any point.
Proofreading
• Remove Spelling Errors
Check spelling mistakes. Look for the words that tend to be misspelled such as their, they’re, there etc. Use proofreader’s marks to make changes later on the computer file. You can see and understand these marks from Merriam Webster’s online help.
• Make Sure Accurate Punctuation Usage
Correcting punctuation mistakes is a tricky part of proofreading process. Errors such as inaccurate commas, improper use of quotation marks and wrong capitalisation are common among students. Also, you must look out other prominent punctuation errors that involve colons, semi-colons, dashes, apostrophes and parenthesis. Make sure if you have used the right “end punctuations” such as full stop, question mark or exclamation mark. You can refer to any authentic style guide to help you solve any particular punctuation problem.
• Rectify Grammar Issues
Check out any wrong sentence structure. Make sure accurate subject-verb agreement, proper verb form, and correct pronoun case. Find out any wrong or misplaced use of modifiers. Read it out loud and check if there is any sentence does not sound right, then locate what needs to be rectified.
Implement Changes in the Computer File
After performing all the corrections, you should then implement all changes in the computer file. Finally run a spelling and grammar checker to further eliminate any existing grammar or punctuation error. This will ensure that your final draft is free from all spelling and grammar mistakes.
