You often hear that you have to edit your essay before submitting it. The advice might be sound and well meaning, however it doesn’t tell you how exactly the editing is done. Editing and proofreading skills don’t come naturally to everyone. In fact, those skills never appear from nowhere, they require special knowledge and a lot of practice. Of course, the safest way is to have your essay edited by professionals. Royal Editing is happy to offer you assistance of experienced, certified editors and proofreaders, who would revise any type of academic papers for a very moderate price that even a student can afford. Nevertheless, if you still want to try to polish your writing by yourself, this article will give you some useful tips on how you can plan your editing process.
Which Steps to Take
Dictionaries define editing as the process of preparing the written document for publication, by the means of revising and correcting mistakes. The definition is clear, however, the process itself still remains a mystery to many people. So how the editing is done and how can you do it? How should you plan editing of your essay? To answer this and other editing related questions you will need first to understand which steps to undertake and what kind of problems to look for. Further we will look at each particular step in detail, making the process of editing more coherent and simple for you.
After you have revised some of your papers and gained more experience, you can write down your personal editing plan. But for now you can use this plan as a starting point in your revision process.
Essay Editing Plan
Check the organizational elements. At the start of your revision process, you have to look at the bigger picture. It means looking closely at the structure of your essay and finding ways to improve it. Firstly, make sure that all ideas of your essay are shaped in clear, logical order and are comprehensible to the reader. Secondly, be certain that each paragraph of your essay develops one central idea. Furthermore, spend some time developing the proper essay structure with introduction, thesis, body paragraphs and conclusion. Remember that each paragraph must have a topic sentence, which identifies the central idea, and sentences that support that idea. You can find out more about organizing the paragraphs from this article on our blog.
Create the outline. To achieve the unity and coherence of your paper, you can benefit from creating an outline. Outline it is short illustration of the main points of your paper. There various ways for outlining and you can chose the one that works best for you. For example, sentence outline uses short sentences to capture the main idea or thesis of each paragraph, one sentence for each paragraph. Another outline technique is mapping or clustering. It involves creating more visual scheme of your main ideas and connections between them. The other very simple outlining method involves creating lists. All you have to do it simply list all the main points of your essay in the same order they appear in the text. Outlining is a good way to find a focus of your paper and to see which things are unnecessary and can be cut out.
Use editing checklists. This method was in detail discussed in one of our articles. If you choose this editing technique you can read that article, which will instruct you and give you some helpful advice. Editing checklist is a list of issues that you have to pay attention to while editing your paper. You have to go through the list one item at a time. Checklists can be of great help for inexperienced editors, who have no idea, what problems to look for. Nevertheless, even experienced professional editors and proofreaders often use the checklists, because they help to focus and not to miss any errors. The checklists can be short or more long detailed one, it is up to you what kind to choose.
Check grammar, spelling and punctuation. Apart from stylistic and structural elements, grammar, spelling and punctuation are the main focus of the editing work. You can be quite successful at this stage of editing process, if you have strong knowledge of grammar and punctuation. However, if you are not so certain about your linguistic abilities, you can benefit from using some of online grammar tools. Such tools will spot most of your grammatical and punctuation errors and advise you about the correct usage. Nevertheless, these machine checks cannot analyze the meaning of your text, thus they are unable to find all the mistakes and correct them properly. The same goes about spelling. There are some amazing spell-check tools on the Internet, but they would not be able to spot every error, for example misused homophones, because they don’t understand what your text is about. In this case, we can only recommend you to keep improving your grammar. Especially, considering all the fabulous educational online grammar tools and apps, which can make learning process easy and fun.
Read out loud. This is a timeless editing trick, based on the fact that your ear is able to spot the errors and logical inconsistencies that your eyes cannot. Try to read your paper out loud at a normal pace and you will definitely hear that some sentences or passages sound too awkward or unnatural. In addition to reading out loud, your editing process will greatly improve if you print out your essay on a paper. Neurologists discovered that our mind perceives the information differently on the computer screen and on the paper. In fact, people analyze and remember better the information, which they have read on the paper. Therefore, you can be sure that when you read your printed version of the essay, you will spot the errors, which you didn’t notice while reading it from the computer.
Order professional editing services. As you see, planning essay editing can be quite time consuming and demanding task. Unfortunately, not everyone has such amount of time to devote to editing, and not every person has the grammar skills and knowledge necessary for such work. Luckily, in our times of modern technologies, everyone on the planet can use the professional editing services without ever leaving their house. Royal Editing is the first rate example of such services. The editing is done quickly and professionally. All you need to do is to upload your paper online. Royal Editing is a trustworthy company, which you can surly rely on.
Contact Us
Hopefully you found these tips helpful and next time when you have to edit your essay, you will be more confident with planning the editing process. If you still have any questions left or want to suggest a topic for an article, please feel welcome to write to us. Your opinion really matters to us and we are happy to receive the letters. This blog is designed to assist you with any possible grammar or editing questions you might have. Moreover, Royal Editing also offers you free samples of essays. You can use them as templates for your own essays or simply as inspiration.