Editing and proofreading essays is very important
It’s essential to proofread your essays so that they’re professional and impress your readers. Proofreading will help you find all the small mistakes that you didn’t even realize you made when you were first writing your essay. Proofreading is what separates a professional essay and those that are less than stellar.
First Draft
When you are writing an essay, first write out your thoughts about the topic without giving any thought to the grammar, punctuation, or flow of your writing. Just get your thoughts down on paper as quickly as possible to maximize your creative output. Your first draft may be longer than your final draft if you tend to be too wordy when you think and talk to others. Or your first draft may need to have content added if you tend to be very brief when expressing yourself.
First Editing
The first time editing the paper work through it and just be sure that it makes sense. Make sure that each paragraph is discussing one topic, that each sentence is clear and concise, and that your ideas are organized in a way that helps the topic make sense. This is the point in your writing where you might do considerable reorganizing of your ideas and your thoughts. Sometimes when ideas flow out of us they aren’t organized in the best way possible. Consider how you would want the story to unfold and then organize your essay around that flow.
Detailed Editing
Detailed editing is the type of editing that most people hate. This is the editing that pays close attention to:
- Spelling
- Grammar
- Verb agreement
- Pronoun agreement
- Punctuation
These aspects of your essay may seem small but they make a huge difference in the quality of what you’re writing. People will instantly take your work more seriously if the detailed editing is complete. So take your time and do the editing right.
It’s best to do the detailed editing after you’ve finished your first edit of the essay. Ideally you’ll have time to let the essay and your mind rest for an hour or a day before doing the detailed editing. This is especially important with longer essays because people have the tendency to read what they think the essay says instead of what is actually on the paper if they edit it too closely after writing it.
Some people are able to go through each sentence and to evaluate each aspect of the detailed editing in the list above. But other people will break it down and read their essay and just focus on each type of thing on each read through. For example, the first time you read through you focus just on the spelling, the next time just the grammar, until finally you’re going through and just scrutinizing the punctuation.
Polishing The Work
It’s smart to give your essay one last read through to catch any errors such as word choice (like their, there, and they’re) that you may have missed while completing the other editing. Once you’ve completed the steps above, your essay is good to go!