After the First Draft Easy Ways to Improve Your Essay Grades

Revising versus Editing Editing: fixing minor errors in your paper like word choice, punctuation marks, and spelling mistakes Revising: making larger changes to the paper, like rewriting or adding to your central argument

Give yourself a break from your paper. Preferably a night or two At worst, spend a couple of hours away from it. You will not catch mistakes if you immediately reread it.

Revise FIrst, edit second. Reread paper and make sure it says exactly what you want it to say. Make sure all of your arguments refer back to your thesis and help to prove it. Rewrite portions of your paper with which you are not happy.

Run spell-check. Catch and correct all obvious spelling mistakes There are no excuses for those

Reread the entire paper word-byword. Check instances of words (‘there’ versus ‘their,’ etc.) Make sure you have the right words in the right places at all times

Check all punctuation marks. Statements should end with periods (.) Questions should end with question marks (?) Open quotation marks(“) should have matching closed quotation marks (”)

Reread the entire paper out loud. Make sure it sounds like normal English. Check to see if you are consistently (and often) repeating words. If so, replace some instances of that word with synonyms.