Submitting an essay signifies the end of a long writing process. You’ve progressed through many steps – selecting a topic, researching, planning the structure, crafting an argumentative thesis, writing the draft, reorganizing, editing repeatedly to refine the message.
Prioritize success by completing essential tasks before submitting your essay, such as thorough proofreading, checking for proper citation, and ensuring adherence to guidelines; for added assurance and excellence, consider seeking the support of Academized – the best essay writing service – to elevate the overall quality and impact of your submission.
Weeks of hard work now crystallize into a document upholding your viewpoint, showcasing your finest critical thinking and communication abilities. Understandably, pressing “Submit” often sparks anxiety.
How can you ensure all that effort receives fair assessment unhampered by easily avoided missteps? Wise students maximize grades through careful final review guided by the following checklist.
Proofread Slowly, Carefully, Repeatedly
By the latest draft stages, your eyes glaze over the words, often seeing what should be rather than what is truly on the page. You’ve been staring at iterations of essentially similar text for so long that your brain fills in gaps, ignores typos and skips past disjointed phrasing.
Don’t rely solely on sight – sound out every syllable aloud instead. Verbalization forces you to pay closer attention to the actual text rather than what you envision reading. Listen for awkwardly long sentences begging for tightening. Flag clumsy passages where shifting one transition word improves flow dramatically.
Printing out essay drafts to proofread also helps detection. Backlighting from digital devices strains eyes, while paper allows notations during close line-by-line inspection without scrolling. Circle morphologically similar terms repeated too often. Underline unnecessarily wordy sections ripe for concision.
Mark passive constructions needing active verbs or transitional phrases requiring punch-up. Jot questions about vague assertions, assumptions requiring citations or potential reasoning flaws. Moving a pen across paper keeps you engaged in text analysis.
Maximize Proofing Power Through Peer Review
For the most rigorous critical feedback possible, have a trusted classmate, roommate, study group member or writing center tutor review your draft. Assume they will discover quality concerns you can no longer identify simply due to mental fatigue and overexposure.
Perspective variance allows others to pinpoint complications like citation oversights, insufficient explanations of key concepts or cultural reference misunderstandings stemming from differences in background knowledge.
Before submitting your essay, ensure a flawless presentation by proofreading meticulously, verifying proper citation, and adhering to formatting guidelines; for additional confidence and refinement, consider leveraging the expertise of the best essay writing services to optimize the overall quality of your work.
Peer editing parties allow collaborative commentary incorporating a spectrum of viewpoints. Project your essay on a big screen so people can use laser pointers highlighting sections eliciting confusion.
Color code marks indicating revisions needed for flow, expanding analysis, providing counter-arguments, refining topic sentences and transitions.
Type changes directly into the shared document for seamless incorporation rather than getting lost amid scribbles on paper. Distribute clean copies to the group once revisions complete so everyone gains helpful habits improving their own editing skills.
Verify Formatting Directions
Some students scribble essays minutes before class, staple their pages together and sprint across campus just making deadline. Don’t mimic that mistake! Carefully check official formatting guidelines whenever an assignment first issues to note required style conventions.
As the first draft takes shapes, continually verify each element – font, margins, line spacing, header contents, page numbering location, footnotes versus endnotes – precisely aligns with directions. Utilize style templates or sample formats provided by professors to simplify properly incorporating all specifications.
An academically outstanding argument encased within a document disobeying instructions still fails the task. Teachers design formats to ease grading efficiency, establish consistency across submissions, teach formal presentation expectations in their discipline and determine rule following reliability.
Failing to use the mandated citation system or ignoring required submission format like double rather than single spacing signals disregard for directions.
This immediately casts your brilliance into doubt, implying similar inattention to detail permeates your analysis. Don’t let a five-minute fix to spacing sabotage an otherwise excellent paper.
Audit Essay Relevance
Writers often spill excessive ink on topics fascinating them before realizing page limitations exclude such tangents alongside required central analysis.
Paragraph after paragraph may intricately explore political backdrop igniting the key event under consideration without directly connecting the issues or explicitly stating the contextual relevance.
Likewise, an extended anecdote recalling related personal experiences may interest readers, but steal space better devoted revealing key investigative findings.
Before submission, carefully audit whether every single sentence clearly links back to supporting the central thesis or answering questions raised by the assignment prompt.
If any portion standalone offers interested ideas but little substantive contribution, either delete it entirely or rewrite it to directly uphold part of the main argument. With space at a premium in any essay or paper, ruthless culling creates room develop the most critical points completely.
Savvy writers also intentionally frontload relevance connections so readers instantly recognize why background details matter instead of questioning inclusion until late explanatory revelation.
Maintain Consistent Writing Style and Tone
Within shorter essay bounds, abrupt stylistic shifts jar the audience. An academic analysis beginning with formal diction quoting famed scholars should not later embed meme references or switch into casual contractions like isn’t/can’t/won’t.
Similarly, pieces utilizing first-person perspective allowing “I/me” statements should stick with individually focused narration based on the author’s experiences rather than bouncing into third-person detached mood midway.
Noticeable inconsistencies make readers question whether an essay hails from just one writer or rather amalgamates disjointed content from multiple people. Carefully proofread to smooth out any tone, voice or perspective pivots into a uniform narrative style.
If portions originated from repurposed documents for other assignments or collaborative writing efforts, rewrite to match language selection appearing organically rather than awkwardly patched together into an essay Frankenstein. This strengthens flow while projecting professionalism.
Perfect And Format All Citations
Incorporating outside evidence provides credibility demonstrating depth of research, range of perspectives reviewed and scholarly thoughtfulness applied to real issues. But sloppily organized citations introduce more weakness than strength.
They imply last-minute afterthoughts hastily assembled rather than purposefully chosen sources. Errors also raise accusations regarding research effort invested, attention to detail applied, and truthfulness upheld.
Before submission, diligently examine that every individual citation fully matches corresponding reference list entries whether following APA, MLA, Chicago or other specified formatting convention. Triple check stylistic particulars like use of italics, punctuation, order of information components fit guidelines.
Verify ample specific details exist allowing readers to pinpoint the exact materials referenced such as volume and issue numbers for journals or publisher name plus date for books.
probe for unbalanced issues like citations present but unmatched reference entries or references lacking associated in-text citation markers. Refine until your essay exemplifies citation excellence.
When In Doubt, Shout It Out Through Citation
Incorporating others’ words and ideas to reinforce or dispute your original interpretations stays standard practice when arguing from an informed perspective anchored by evidence.
But Weaving in too much quoted verbatim text fails to demonstrate your critical thinking prowess. Even more dangerously, neglecting attribution through quotation marks or citations for verbatim passages – regardless of length – qualifies as idea theft rather than ethical integration.
Plagiarism issues often brew unintentionally through simple oversight, especially when synthesizing research from abundant sources. You forget specific phrasing first appeared in a journal article and isn’t common knowledge.
Transition words subtly shift initially unique wording into slight misrepresentation devoid of credit. But intent fails to grant excuse – all usage of others’ distinctive expressions, specialized terms, original metaphors etc mandates attribution, even despite otherwise original commentary surround the content.
Save sufficient pre-submission time confirming sources reveal whether unique wording requires quotation marks or paraphrasing coupled with citations.
If you ever question whether a particular section is common knowledge or the originally worded intellectual property of another deserving acknowledgement, cite the source.
Avoid accidental plagiarism sinking stellar scholarship through adjustments before rather than after submission leading to catastrophic consequences.
Inject Easy Improvements For Instant Uplift
Before declaring any draft complete, rapid-fire quick fixes inject significant strengthening. Plug essay into word processor spelling and grammar checking tools to catch typos, missing words and basic mechanical mistakes. Search for frequently confused homophones like they’re/their/there to fix additional errors unflagged in standard processes.
Trim unnecessary adjective clutter or meaningless intensifiers that subtract authority rather than amplifying statements. Reduce rambling by consolidating choppy short sentences into combined smoother flows. Transition choppy paragraph breaks into logical order showcasing progression of logic.
Replace weak verbs with powerful action words clinching arguments. Break immense paragraphs into shorter chunks easing reader progress through visual white space.
Simple revisions pack significant shaping improvements that enhance audience engagement, demonstrate masterful writing prowess and boost persuasiveness. With effort already invested in content, maximize positive outcomes through minor tweaks elevating essays to next level quality.
Read Backwards To Discover New Flaws
After endlessly reading previous iterations, your brain automatically fills in expected words when fatigued eyes traverse the semi-familiar document yet again. You skim rather than scrutinize, causing misses of misspellings, omitted words, incomplete edits and disjointed sequencing that disrupts coherency. Shake up that habitual forward-flow viewing by examining the printed pages backward.
Yes, start at the conclusion and work sentence by sentence toward the originally opening statements. This oddly unfamiliar vantage jolts concentration onto the actual visible words rather than breezing through already ingrained expectations of what should arrive next. Sudden context confusion and loss of anticipated direction magnifies latent deficiencies.
Highlight disconnected concepts begging bridging enhancement, incomplete explanations requiring qualifications and other flaws smuggled past perception in standard order review.
Pinpoint areas needing patching to smooth out the journey for readers encountering content sequentially without backward understanding springboarding comprehension glitches.
Take An Essay Break Before Final Wrap Up
Creative currents flow freely when initially drafting essays, but tuning attempts often reach diminishing returns even as small gaps persist. Ideas cemented into solid arguments after extended pondering and tweaking no longer yield to even the craftiest word smithing.
Themes crystalized into succinct taglines fail opening into elucidating lines. So close to completed, yet missing the culminating catalysts elevating essays from great to brilliant before final submission.
Rather than pushing fruitlessly against exhausted creativity depleted by prior proofing, step completely away for a few hours or overnight. Full concentration capacity restoration requires more than the few minutes between classes.
Deliberately shift mental focus onto entirely unrelated activities like exercising, cooking or community service volunteering. Allow slick new solutions and shining enhancements to percolate subconsciously before returning to put the finishing polish boosting your essay above ordinary expectations.
