The Major Task of Editing

So, I work in a Tertiary education institution and I’ve seen quite a lot of papers go unedited by students and to me editing is one of the most important parts of writing a paper. How can your ideas be taken seriously if there is poor or no editing. How can you show yourself in a good light with poorly written papers? Now no one is perfect and we all make mistakes, but I have seen papers that appear to not have been given a re-read upon completing the writing. So, I thought maybe the best possible topic to address would be how to edit a paper.

First, of all I will start by saying after you have completed a paper, you may be exhausted and in need of a break. So you are very well entitled to have a short rest. Whether its 5 minutes, an hour or two days is up to you since it depends on how much time you have left before the paper has to be submitted. However, I wouldn’t recommend you waiting too long and risking forgetting key information about the topic.

After you are rested or relaxed, print out your paper so that you can edit it hard copy and proceed with reading. Start by reading and editing paragraph by paragraph focusing on organising sentence structure, ideas and paragraph structure to ensure that there is a proper sequence to the paper.

The next step is of course reading it again but this time to assess whether your paper answers the question, or properly deals with the task at hand. This time you must ensure that all aspects of the question, topic or situation are all addressed.

Once you have assessed your paper and added the requirements you then have to re–read the paper again to make sure that you have no duplicate ideas and that you weed out any information that is unimportant of irrelevant. It is essential the focus of the paper is clear and to the point.

Of course, a second opinion is always nice once you have the opportunity, so perhaps get one of your friends, co-workers or family member to help you out. I would say avoid classmates that are doing the exact same topic or paper to avoid accidental plagiarism. Based on the second options if there were any errors in the paper they should be amended immediately and the paper should be given a once-over.

I strongly believe that 50% of the job of doing a paper is the editing. Editing allows a chance for new thoughts or opinions to come into your mind that you hadn’t though about while doing the paper. It also gives you a chance to realise that an idea you had probably didn’t make any sense or wasn’t the best choice for that particular paper. So take my tips and go bold with your essay writing and editing.

Nikita