Academic Essay | Revising and Editing
Academic Essay
Revising and Editing
Revising is different from drafting in that drafting is more spontaneous and dynamic, revision more thoughtful and critical.
When you are revising, do not pay attention to details and forget about the main points of your writing.
Try to focus on everything you have written. Try to be the reader of your own writing. Evaluate and criticize your own writing; this is why you have to be as detached as possible.
Read your writing as if you were another person evaluating someone else’s writing and put yourself in the reader’s shoes.
Revising, has to do with the way you express yourself and formulate your ideas. We can say it has to do with the content you have put on paper.
This includes adding or deleting ideas, reformulating or changing the order of ideas, making ideas clearer and more concrete, for instance.
It can also include character or setting development when writing narratives.
To put it more briefly, revision has to do with making writing more effective. This can also include paying great attention to the layout of the essay, its complete shape and the way it is laid on paper.
This means you have to pay attention to whether the essay is balanced: whether the introduction and conclusion are balanced and also whether the body paragraphs are balanced.
Attention! should also be given to whether the essay is unified and coherent or not, whether transitions inside paragraphs and between them are insured, whether writing is smooth, and whether it flows or stumbles.
A well-developed English Essay should flow and should be easy to read. It should be clear and concise. If it is not, this means it still needs editing and revising.
Attention! should also be given to the development of the argument and to whether every paragraph has its own topic sentence and to whether this topic sentence is well developed.
A convincing Academic Essay is a dynamic essay, not a static one: the more your argument is sound and well founded the more it develops.
When the reader reaches the conclusion, he should feel that you have progressed, and the argument has started at one point and ended at another.
At the end of the Essay, the main argument and its main phases as well as the conclusion should be clear in the reader’s mind. If they are not, you have missed the point.
This phase of revising and editing also consists in correcting the mistakes related to the correct use of language including spelling, grammar, punctuation and sentence structure.
When considering your spelling, consider the use of capital letters as well as spelling mistakes made in the process of writing.
Consider your Grammar and see whether you have used the correct tenses, and whether your tenses are consistent.
Consider shift in tenses, shift in voice, shift in discourse. Consider whether your word choice and word order are grammatical.
See whether you have used sentences correctly, whether you have used any choppy sentences or sentence fragments.
Consider clarity, wordiness and conciseness by asking yourself whether you have expressed yourself as clearly and as concisely as to make the reader understand you without difficulties.
Read slowly and stop at areas of difficulties you know you have in expressing yourself. Avoid awkward style and awkward ways of expression. Pay attention to generalizations and confusing ways of writing.
For this purpose, you can even use a check list so as to remind yourself of the things you have to pay attention to.
A check list is a piece of paper on which you can jot down all the aspects of writing you have to consider in your revision whether they have to do with ideas or with expressing them.
Your list can contain all you want to remember. The main purpose behind the check list is to remind you of what you have to focus on when you are revising.
When you are convinced that you have revised and checked everything in your piece of writing, copy it on a clean, neat paper in clear, easily readable handwriting.
The reader should not dwell on your writing to decipher your words. This will be very damaging to your writing, especially if it is meant to be marked. The reader should read your paper without difficulties.
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