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9 Essential Editing Tips to Use in Your Essay Writing

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Great Essay writing
Great Essay writing:
Essay Writing tips
Essay Writing tips contemplated.

Essay Writing tips: A run down of essential techniques that will ensure a well written college paper, essay, document that will help best deliver your message. 

A well written essay means good grades in college, admission to a prestigious university, and much more. One of the proven ways to ensure that you submit a top notch essay to your professor is editing. It is, therefore, important to set aside some time to edit your paper before submitting.

Editing will help you perfect the structure and the wording of your essay. You will be able to get rid of grammatical errors, typos, tautology and other elements that lower the quality of your writing. In this article, there are guidelines to remember when editing your work. Always apply these tips and you will never regret.

1. Ensure that the structure of your essay is spot-on.

Structure is vital in essay writing. Ensure that your ideas are coherent and that they result in logical arguments. Essays are basically linear, and they present a single idea at a time. Therefore, they have to represent ideas in a way that a reader will easily understand.  Correct structuring means making it easier for the reader to understand your points. The focus of the essay determines its structure. It determines the info that readers need to know and the order in which it will be presented. Hence, the structure is essentially unique to the main ideas in the essay.

2. Keep Sentences and Paragraphs short.

Smaller sentences and paragraphs encourage reading. They also drive points easily compared to longer ones. Long paragraphs are hard to understand; hence they easily put off a reader, especially those with short attention span. Therefore, consider using short sentences and paragraphs.

An ideal paragraph should be three to four sentences. You can avoid long paragraphs by starting a new one after the third or fourth sentence. It is also important to avoid wordiness by condensing your words. You can replace the phrase “on a regular basis” with “regularly. ” You can also write “in the month of April” as “in April.”

3. Check for informal vocabulary.

Some words may not be suitable for your essay. Examples are informal words that are only appropriate in spoken English. Informal language is as important as the formal language. However, some words are more suitable to use in the informal language than in the formal language. You can replace a phrase like “a couple of students” with “several students” which is more formal. To ensure that your essay is more formal, remove aspects of informal writing in your work. Examples of informal aspects are contractions (for example, can’t), slang, clichés, and abbreviations.

4. Replace weak verbs with strong verbs.

Choosing strong verbs is a key to good writing. Strong verbs create vibrant mental images that enable readers to understand the message that the writer intended to convey. Sentences with weak verbs do not catch the attention of the reader. Phrasal verbs, for instance, are more suitable in informal language as they can lower the quality of your essay.

Use strong verbs like replace instead of put back, establish instead of set up, tolerate instead of put up with and admire instead of look up to. Also consider a sentence like “I took a course in Biology.” The sentence is not as good as “I enrolled in a Biology course.” Lastly, avoid passive voice in your writing. Consider a sentence like “the food was eaten by the child.” The sentence is in a passive voice, and it can make more sense in an active form, “the child ate the food.”

Essay Writing tips
Essay Writing tips: Mastering a write up that will engage readers also means paying attention to form.

5. Use suitable transitions

Transitions are vital in the development of good essays. They establish a sense of coherence and avail signposting for readers to track the writer’s sequence of thoughts. Using a suitable transition that allows for logical connection ensures that the readers understand your essay in the way you intended.

Consider a sentence like “British Essay Writer has made a strong case for his view and also provided some tangible evidence to back his arguments against abortion. Conversely, he has also appealed to the religious leaders to stand against the vice. “

In this sentence, the use of conversely is wrong as what follows is not in contrast with the earlier sentence. Moreover or furthermore could have been more appropriate because the writer is trying to add more information in support of the researcher’s argument.

6. Check for Redundancy.

Conciseness is another important aspect of a good essay. You need to ensure the essay that you submit to your instructor is precise and concise. You can achieve that by using only the necessary words to convey your message. Avoid adding irrelevant information to increase the length of your essay or create imaginative expressions. The important thing is to pass your message effectively.

To remove redundancy, you need to ensure that what you have written is fundamental to the message you intend to convey. You may find yourself writing something like “deliberate suicide” when you already know that there is no “accidental suicide.” The word suicide should not have a qualifier.

7. Consistent spelling.

The spelling of some words is different especially in the US and UK English. Therefore, the words have more than one correct spelling. Such words include behavior (behaviour), color (Colour), and center (Centre). It is important to ensure their spelling is consistent throughout your essay. Many word processors allow you to choose your default language, and the spell check highlights any word that is incorrectly spelt. Take advantage of the word processor to ensure that the spelling of every word in your essay is correct.

8. Correct Formatting.

The appearance of your paper is equally important as the above aspects. Some essays have instructions on how to format them, while others do not. Notwithstanding that, it is important to be consistent with the font style, font size, italics, underline and all other aspects that affect the appearance of your essay. Consistency will make your work appear professional.

9. Look out on the frequently misused words.

Examples of words that are often misused are affect and effect, lie and lay and accept and except. Though the words sound alike, they have different meanings. Therefore, using them interchangeably will make you end up with a different meaning than what you intended to say. It is their crucial to go through your essay to ensure that you have not used some words incorrectly.

Essay Writing tips
Essay Writing tips: Despair not! Help is on its way….
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