Don’t underestimate your ability to make silly mistakes when you’ve been staring at your essay for a week. When students are under pressure they just want to be done, but to do your best essay it may be necessary to prolong the agony a little longer. We’ll assume that you’ve followed our advice about doing your essay in time to edit it properly. Once you get a draft we think you need at least two weeks. Set it aside for the first week without looking at it.
When you do pick it up again, you’ll be able to look at it with fresh eyes. Material that seemed to flow logically after you had been staring at it for hours may now seem disjointed. Errors that had camouflaged themselves will jump out. After you have gone over the essay yourself, get an adult such as your English teacher, guidance counselor, or parent to read it. Hopefully, he or she can give you two kinds of advice:
- Big-picture feedback about your ideas and whether your essay says what you want it to say.
- Micro-level feedback on details like typos, word choice, and spelling.
The following is a laundry list of things to look for when you edit:
- Lack of a main idea—The college essay is often a one-shot deal, and the impulse to cram in as much as possible can be strong. If you start out talking about why you love debate and finish with a discussion of your relationship with the debate coach—who also happens to be your English teacher—you may need to sharpen your focus and expand on one or the other.
- Weak verbs—How strong and precise are your verbs? List every one of them in your essay and see how good they are. Too many “to be” verbs are a bad sign, as in, “Jessica’s dance across the floor was graceful.” Better would be “Jessica danced gracefully across the floor.” Best would be “Jessica glided across the dance floor.” Notice that a strong verb—“glided”—provides a much more vivid description than “danced gracefully” or “was graceful.”
- Passive voice—Sometimes, the person doing the acting disappears altogether, as in, “It is clear that the job must be done.” Even if the sentence were to say, “The job must be done by Tom,” it would still be convoluted and passive. An active sentence would say, “Tom must do the job.” Notice, too, that passive voice uses a “to be” verb. Avoid it.
- Failure to use “I”—Most students have had at least one teacher who told them never to use “I” in a paper. (Instead of “I think,” you might say something like “One can conclude.”) But in a college essay, always use “I” when you’re talking about yourself. It is far more honest and direct than cloaking yourself in phony third-person omniscience.
- Double-dipping adjectives—If you describe a “cool, clear, sparkling mountain stream,” you’ve overdone it. Instead of using two or three adjectives at a time, choose the one best, as in “the sparkling mountain stream.” Go back over your essay and see how many times you used one adjective versus two or three. Were two really necessary? Sometimes the answer is yes, sometimes no.
- Too many simple sentences—A few simple sentences are great for effect—just make sure that your entire essay isn’t made up of them. A bunch of simple sentences merely list disconnected ideas; compound and complex sentences establish relationships between those ideas and allow you to explore nuances. For instance: “I had a headache. I went home.” Or again: “I went home because I had a headache. “ Or finally: “Though I went home with a headache, it wasn’t as bad as the one that sent me to the hospital last year.” The first example makes no connection between the headache and going home; the second describes a cause-and-effect relationship; and the third retains the relationship while adding more perspective.
- Wordiness—Even good essays are full of words that aren’t necessary. Any word that does not add insight or specificity should be cut. Likely candidates include clauses like “as you can see” and “it is obvious that” and words such as “basically,” “perhaps,” and “additionally.” Scrutinize your essay one word and one clause at a time. Is everything necessary? If you think your prose is wordy but have trouble cutting, ask a reader to mark words and passages that seem superfluous. It is always easier to cut someone else’s essay than to cut your own.
- Messed up tenses—When in doubt, use the present tense rather than the past. When both the present and past are technically correct, the present is more immediate. When we refer to the essays in this book, we say that the author “writes” about a particular subject rather than “wrote” about it. While this may be a matter of preference, it is crucial is to avoid inconsistency among tenses from one sentence and paragraph to the next.
- • Trusting the spell check—It won’t catch some of the most common errors, like when you write “an” and mean “and,” when you leave out a word, or when you write “there” and mean “their.” Definitely do the spell check, but don’t make it a substitute for human editing.
- • Unwillingness to start over—Sometimes it takes three or four hours of work, and maybe even a complete first draft, to realize that your topic isn’t working. Some students can’t bear to let what they have written go to waste, and end up with an inferior essay. Don’t be afraid to cut out entire sections or chuck the whole thing—even if some of it is good material. Two really good pages that don’t mesh will make a worse essay than one good page standing alone.
When you finally think you’re ready to click on “send,” hit “save” instead and come back again for one last review. The vast majority of essays, even the good ones, include at least one misspelling, typo, or other error. Only after you have proofread yet again, and found nothing, should you consider yourself done.
Read More : Essays Writing: Dotting the I’s and Crossing the T’s
