How do you make your essay perfect? Definitely, it is by adhering to suggested formatting guidelines and ensuring that your paper has flawless grammar. To achieve these objectives, you must follow every writing step. Unfortunately, most students overlook the editing phase and tend to confuse it with proofreading. Usually, the former entails enhancing the structure, readability, and flow of an essay, while the latter refers to amending surface errors, specifically punctuation, spelling, and grammar. Just like writing, you must practice editing to be perfect in writing quality and well-structured paper.
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Top 6 essay editing essentials
Have you ever asked yourself, “things I should know to make my essays perfect?” Such thoughts might have criss-crossed your mind before or after you have written a paper. In some instances, you might have been effective or unsuccessful in editing your work. What could be the reason for such inconsistencies? The reason could be a lack of understanding of what tools, materials, strategies, and external assistance you need for editing. Therefore, bulkquotesnow.com highlights some of the tips, technologies, and help you might consider using for your assignments and emails for professional and business purposes to be faultless.
1. Prune long sentences
How often has your professor or instructor given you an essay topic without a word limit? In most cases, if this incident occurs, almost every student would seek clarification. Surprisingly, some professors might require you to set your word limit. What could be the consequences of such a requirement? Definitely, some students would write more pages than others, hoping to get high grades. You will realize that the word limit was never a determinant of the scores. So, is it important to set the number of pages in essay writing?
Yes, of course, since professors not only test your ability to answer questions but also if you can communicate concisely and clearly. With the word limit, you will be cautious about what you say, enabling you to improve your writing skills. A requirement for a specific number of pages also perpetuates fairness in grading. Thus, what should you do to meet the word count after exceeding the limit?
The best way will be to prune long sentences. How can you accomplish strategy? Basically, you can begin by eliminating wordiness. For instance, you can write “assume” instead of “making an assumption” or “hence” rather than “for that reason.” Another strategy is replacing phrasal verbs with one word. For example, use “postpone” instead of “put off.” Pruning would enhance the readability of your essay, besides enabling you to meet the word count.
2. Turnitin
After meeting the recommended word count, you should check the similarity of your essay. Despite the availability of several free anti-plagiarism software online, it would be best if you consider using Turnitin. Everything you need to know about this tool is that most universities and colleges across the globe use it to check for similarity based on online databases. Does it mean you will use the services of this anti-plagiarism software for free?
In this case, it would be only possible if your university allows you to check for similarity before final submission. Ideally, most universities use instructor’s Turnitin to publish the paper after checking for plagiarism. Considering this drawback, it would be best if a student could purchase the tool. Although a quick search on the Internet reveals that Turnitin hardly allows individual purchases, you might subscribe for the services at about $3 a year. However, you will have limited slots for checking plagiarism, suggesting you might end up subscribing more than 4 times per month. What does this mean? Additional expenses and yet essay editing services can do it at affordable rates and within a short duration.
Besides checking for plagiarism, an expert would rephrase the plagiarized sentences or cite the information appropriately. You will also have a leeway to request more editing compared to using Turnitin.
3. Purdue writing lab
Even if your paper’s similarity is zero, a professor might consider it plagiarized. With this statement, what comes to your mind? In this case, just say, “All I need to know is proper formatting.” It means your paper should contain citations and reference entries. Your professor might require you to format your paper in APA, MLA, Chicago, and Harvard, among others. Considering that it is challenging to master all rules, you require a reliable website for guidance.
It would be best if you considered using the Purdue writing lab despite the availability of other online sites. By navigating this website, you will know how to reference and cite electronic sources, books, periodicals, and other common sources. Purdue writing lab provides examples of formatting sources without authors or date of publication. For high school students, you might consider using the citation machine, an inbuilt search engine on the website for referencing and citing. Therefore, during the editing of your work, it will be best if you keep consulting the Purdue writing lab for accuracy.
4. Grammarly
Even after editing your work diligently, you might be unable to spot some minor grammar mistakes. In particular, you might be using UK English rather than US one. For instance, replacing “organisation” with “organization.” Such a mistake might make your professor think that another person completed your paper. The penalty for such academic misconduct can be severe to the extent of expulsion from the program. You can avoid this mistake with Grammarly by just setting the language to your preferred country.
With this software, you can also spot a monotonous paragraph. The color highlights will enable you to change the structure of sentences. Another good thing about Grammarly concerns rectifying typo errors that might alter the meaning of a statement or the entire paragraph. Although unreliable, you might check the plagiarism of your paper with this software. Previous attempts have shown that Grammarly can detect papers copied from online databases such as course hero and chegg.com.
5. Avoid overreliance on a spell checker
While using thesaurus on Microsoft Word or Grammarly, you might want to change every highlighted word. Ideally, it is a sure way of ensuring that your essay is grammatically correct. However, such a strategy might be misleading when writing a technical paper. For Grammarly, you might want to hire an editor to enhance the quality of your essay. But, what lesson do we learn from this?
Over-reliance on spell checker software might distort the information on your paper. For instance, most medical and biological terminologies originate from Greek. It means that Grammarly might unrecognize such words unless you add them to the dictionary. When rephrasing the information from scholarly sources such as books and journals, make sure you double-check during editing. Some individuals search for the correct spelling of medical terminology on the Internet. Overall, be cautious when using a spell checker to proofread your technical papers.
6. Check for repetitions
The last tip concerns eliminating repetitions of words in a sentence or statement following each other. Such mistakes are common when writing a business paper. For example, you might find yourself repeating the word. employee. In this case, you can search for synonyms like a worker, workforce, or staff member. Ideally, you can click find on the home tab and then enter the word you perceive you have repeated. Upon highlighting, consider replacing them with synonyms.
Overall, these essay editing essentials ensure that your paper is original and perfect before final submission. If you are busy or committed to career or home responsibilities, you can hire an editor from a reputable company to assist. Better yet, hire an experienced essay editing service to edit and proofread your work and be assured that it is error-free and impressive.
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