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Reading Your Essay Over
It seems no matter how many times students are advised to do this, they keep ignoring it. It is probably the single most important thing you can do to improve your essay: READ IT OVER TO YOURSELF! That means actually read it, don't skim it. If you find that your brain inadvertently skims it, try reading it out loud and listen to how it sounds. Do the sentences sound jarring? Does it make sense? If you hadn't researched it, would you understand it?

To improve further, GET A FRIEND TO READ THE ESSAY as well. They may find inadvertent errors such as spell-check failures (i.e. "from" when you mean "form" and vice versa), bad edits (i.e. Smith went to the a store (forgot to remove "a" or "the")), repetitions (i.e. He said, "Blah blah blah," he said), and other elements you may miss after staring at it for so long. Furthermore, if your friend is completely confused as to what you mean by a particular sentence, paragraph, or the entire essay, you know you have done something wrong. You don't have to accept every bit of nitpicking advice from your friend, but keep in mind that if they don't understand your phrasing, your teacher or professor may not either.

Cleaning Up
If you're using a computer and don't bother spell-checking your essay, you deserve marks off for every spelling error you make. It only takes a few minutes, and an essay rife with spelling errors looks sloppy and unfinished.

Go over the essay for consistency. After writing these pages, I realized I had sometimes capitalized widget watching and sometimes not. While it probably should be capitalized when it's part of a name (i.e. New York Widget Watchers), the rest of the time it should be lower case, so I went through and changed it. You can use your word processor's 'find and replace' function for this kind of thing, but beware that it will change every instance unless you make sure that it doesn't. Other consistency issues could be how you deal with numbers (I use the standard journalist format of spelling out only numbers less than 10), how you refer to people (usually use only the last name after the first instance unless there are references to different people with the same last name), whether subtitles are bolded, underlined, or both, and the style of attribution.

Make sure the pages are formatted according to the teacher/professor's instructions. Standard essays are double spaced (meaning blank lines between written lines) with one inch margins all around, and page numbers. Some professors might require headers on all pages with your name, that certain pages begin halfway down, etc. (In fact, putting your name on every page, whether in a header or perhaps written neatly on the back of each page, is a good idea in case the pages come apart.) Other formatting guidelines can be found at the Nuts and Bolts of College Writing. If you didn't include formatting considerations while writing, be sure to apply the formatting required now.

If you have used tables or graphics in your essay, after you've finished all the necessary formatting you should check that the table or graphic is still where you wish it to be. Formatting moves things around quite a bit, and you may find that things are now on the wrong page. Also, if you have a table of contents or any other reference to specific pages, make sure the page numbers still match.

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