Nailing It: Tips For Writing Essays

So you have completed that paper. Maybe you raced through it, throwing everything out on a page as some books suggest, and you’re now planning to shape up the mess you’ve made. Maybe you made changes as you wrote, minor alterations, exchanging one word for another here and there, shifting a passive verb to active, perhaps even moving an entire paragraph to better buttress your argument.

​Either way, the time has now come to edit your paper.

Some of you may dislike editing. You’ve written the paper. Good grief, isn’t that enough?
           
Nope. Not nearly enough.
           
Editing is crucial for a good essay.
           
Happily, I enjoy editing, my work and the work of others. (My wife used to tell me that I would edit God and the Bible, if allowed.) Editing is like washing the dishes, sweeping the floor, and tidying up the kitchen after a grand feast. You put everything in its place. You leave the premises shining.
           
Here are some steps to help you become an editor.
           
You’ve finished the paper.
           
If the deadline for delivery of the paper is still a few days in the future, step away from your words and sentences for a day. Take a breather. If the essay is due tomorrow and it’s already eight o’clock in the evening, step away for half an hour.
           
​Now you’re back at the keyboard. Here are the essentials for proofreading your work.

1. Read silently through the essay, making changes as you go.
2. Now read through the essay aloud. This tactic brings your ears as well as your eyes into play. Sometimes when I take this step, I change my voice, speaking like a Southerner from Charleston, or perhaps Mobile, just so I can hear the words in a voice not naturally my own. Listen as you read. Does that sentence sound clunky? Change it. Have your varied the length of your sentences? If you have too many short sentences, you create a choppy effect in the prose. You will hear that choppiness as you read. Try some sentence combinations and see if that gets rid of the chop. Did you pause somewhere as you read? If so, consider adding a comma there, if grammar permits. Is there a rhythm to your writing? Great.
3. Run the spelling and grammar check. If you disagree with some of the recommendations—the check wants you to shove a semicolon into a sentence or demands you add an “and” in a series—go with your instincts and ignore the check.
4. Run a hard copy of the essay and read it again. An editor once told me that nearly every time he read a hard copy of what he had written on a screen he found mistakes in the copy. So read the essay again, pen or pencil in hand.
5. Find someone whose language skills you trust and ask that person read the essay. Don’t pick a good friend who is intent only on praising you. One of my sons, now an attorney, used to take his papers to a writing clinic while in college. Here a fellow student, a young no-nonsense woman with a keen eye for grammar, syntax, and spelling, would tear apart his writing. Some of the other students avoided this editor, considering her cruel, but my son recognized her skills and took advantage of her competence.
6. Finally, if necessary, run off the copy of the essay for the classroom. Keep this copy fresh and clean. A crinkled, stained essay tells the teacher or reader that you really didn’t care about the assignment.

 
Attend to these things, and your essay will shine.