Editing Your Article

One of the most laborious tasks, when it comes to academic writing, is the editing. Often students somehow manage to finish writing the paper, but when it comes to editing, they do a shoddy job, and this amounts to low grades or marks. However, to give in a good academic essay, editing the article is extremely important.

The first thing you need to do is to develop a good plan for revision - remember that editing does not just mean checking for grammatical mistakes. It also means evaluating the whole paper to make sure the idea or central theme is properly explained, checking the use of punctuation, and deciding whether the purpose of the essay has been fulfilled. Here are some suggestions on editing your paper.

The first suggestion is to evaluate your original thesis statement to make sure that it mirrors your conclusion - sometimes when we start essay writing, we go with the flow and often go in different directions. So when you come to the end, it is important to check whether the conclusion you have made in your paper is the same as your original thesis statement. That way you know that you cannot possibly lose marks for that. Your thesis should ideally parallel your last or concluding paragraph. Let's put it this way - the condition of your thesis should be met at the ending of the essay.

The topic sentences should be gone through carefully - as these are very vital to the whole essay. Your topic sentences should always be synonymous with the thesis - for instance, if you are talking about "Macbeth", you need to talk about the characters the plot, the setting, etc. You cannot bring in another Shakespearean play! The thesis should be carefully analyzed.

Another part of editing is to go through the quotes and the quotation marks very carefully - sometimes you would need to add references or citations to support them. The quotes should fit into the theme or idea of your paper, if you see that a particular quote does not fit into the paragraph, or indeed the thesis, then you would do better to remove it.

If you, anywhere in the academic paper, have given plot summaries, remove them. These are not required, as they are basically seen as repetitions. Don't 'retell' the story - analyze it.

So if you edit your article, the theme, the grammar, the sentence construction, etc. properly, you will do a good job with the grade!