Many students score poor grades because they don’t know how to revise an essay. Writing a brilliant essay requires time, skills, and experience. However, you should revise your essay after writing it to make it better. That way, the educator will have minimal reasons to give you a low grade. It’s crucial to note that revising an essay doesn’t mean a student is a bad writer.
Every writer understands that editing their work before submitting it is crucial. What’s more, good writing results from continuous editing and endless practice. Even a talented and experienced writer turns to professional editors once in a while and says, “Please revise my essay.” That’s because they know they can’t notice all errors if they revise their essay when tired. So, if you want to score the top grades in your essay assignments, always revise them before submission.
What Does It Mean to Revise Your Essay?
Revision means “to see again” or to give something a fresh look from a critical perspective. Revising an essay is an ongoing process that entails rethinking it, reconsidering the arguments in it, reviewing the presented evidence, refining the purpose, reorganizing the presentation, and reviving its stale prose. When you revise your essay you make it better.
Ideally, revision entails more than fixing spelling and punctuation mistakes. That is known as proofreading and it’s crucial before submitting your paper. However, if your essay has predictable ideas, a weak thesis, and a messed-up organization, proofreading won’t help. Instead, you should revise essay first and then proofread.
A Step-by-Step Guide on How to Revise an Essay
If you have adequate time to revise a paper, take it to perfect your work. That way, you will impress the educator with your work. Rewording your essay or using better words and avoiding repetition is only a part of the revision process. And this is what most people call editing, which is an essential final step of polishing a written work. However, rephrasing won’t make a difference if you don’t think through the ideas of your essay. In some cases, students learn how to revise an essay in college. If that’s not the case for you, here are the steps to follow when revising your essay.
- Put the draft aside: Once you’re done writing the essay, put the draft aside for some time. That way, you will be more objective when you come back for essay revision.
- Get feedback: When revising the essay, you know what you want to say. That means you might not be the best judge to determine the clarity of your draft. Therefore, allow another person to revise the essay for you. For instance, you can get free online essay revision to determine where your essay is unclear. Once you get the feedback, use it to clarify your ideas in the essay.
- Create a backward outline: Revision of an essay begins when you start thinking about the issues or points you’re trying to articulate and how you’ve presented them. And a backward outline enables you to do that. This outline should identify your main idea in every paragraph. Use the outline to rank the ideas based on their importance in supporting your thesis statement. Also, consider the connections you’ve used between the ideas.
- Rethink the thesis statement: You can restructure the argument, reorder the point, eliminate redundancies or irrelevancies, or add implications and complications based on your previous step. Your essay might also require additional evidence.
- Fix the conclusion and introduction: Some people revise an essay from the introduction to the conclusion. However, the best approach is to start with the body of the essay. That’s because you will know what you want to introduce and how to conclude your argument when you start with the body. When revising the introduction, make sure that it starts with a topic sentence. Also, make sure that each paragraph has linking ideas based on your thesis statement. Your conclusion should wrap your argument nicely.
- Proofread: When proofreading your essay, aim for language economy and precision. Your essay revision checklist should include the items to fix when proofreading. These can include grammatical, spelling, and punctuation errors. Take your time to fix all these errors, including factual mistakes.
Some guides on how to revise a paper recommend reading it aloud. That way, you can notice stylistic infelicities. And this can help if you suspect that your eyes might have missed something when revising the essay.
Effective Paper Revision Tips
Many students know the importance and the steps to follow when revising their essays. However, they encounter challenges when trying to complete this task. So, how do you revise an essay fast without leaving some errors unfixed? Here are helpful tips to guide you.
- Create an essay revision plan: Come up with a plan to guide you throughout the revision process. For instance, you can opt to put the draft aside twice during the revision process. And you can do this by taking a break after reorganizing the work and coming back to polish the work by proofreading.
- Get feedback: You can miss some of the mistakes in your essay because you’ve written it. Therefore, consider using a tool or service to revise essay online free of charge. That way, you will get feedback that can guide you in polishing your work. The internet is awash with tools that allow for free essay revision. However, some of these services will require you to sign up first before using them.
- Take your time: Even the smartest writer will take time to revise paper or essay they’ve written. That’s because they know that fixing all issues in written work requires careful attention to detail. For this reason, some writers opt to revise essay online using sophisticated tools. But if this is not an option for you, take your time to fix all errors in your essay.
- Seek assistance: If you don’t have the time to essay revise, seek help from friends or relatives. You can ask a neighbor or a colleague to go through your essay highlighting your mistakes. After that, you can go through the essay fixing the mistakes your friend has highlighted.
If still unsure what revising an essay entails, you can check some revision essay examples online. That way, you will get a hint of what revision essay is and how to complete this task. Alternatively, you can use an online essay revision service. With this option, you pay an expert to revise your essay. And this is the best approach if you have limited time and you don’t want mistakes to ruin your grade after spending hours or days writing the essay. With some services, you say something like, “Please revise my essay free of charge” to get professional assistance.
