Writing academic essays: editing and proofreading

Writing an academic essay involves more than simply writing the essay. Whenever you are given the task of writing an essay, you should always know that you will need to edit and proofread the piece, too. If you are like many students, you do not mind writing the essay, but you probably find difficulty editing and proofing the essay. Many students have difficulty because they cannot look at their essays with fresh eyes to actually see the errors. Fortunately, there are a few ways to proofread and edit that are actually quite effective.

The One Foot Voice

One of the most effective proofreading techniques involves using a “one-foot” voice. To accomplish this, you read your essay outloud, but in a very quiet voice that cannot be heard more than one foot away from you. When you read your academic essay outloud, you will be able to hear the errors rather than see them. For many years, students have found that by reading their essay aloud they find a significant amount of errors that would have lowered their grades.

Start at the End to Help Yourself

Another effective proofreading and editing technique is reading the essay from the end to the beginning. This style of proofreading is effective because students are looking at their essays from different perspectives. When you read from the end, you do start at the beginning of the last sentence. Students will notice their errors quite quickly. Some students do read from the last word to the first word so they can look for missing words and this style does work, too.

Hire an Editor for Professional Work

If you do not mind having other people help you with your academic work, then the best way to edit and proofread your essays is to have someone else read it and edit it for you. You might have to pay omeone, unless you have a person in your life who can directly help. There are websites that specialize in proofreading and editing essays, but you will need to pay for someone to take care of this. The fees are usually affordable and the websites usually hire only professional writers and editors. You are bound ot get good service when you hire someone to read your essay for you. Since a professional editor does not know you, the editor will be honest, since it is a professional relationship.