6 Ways To Edit Your Paper

The editing process is often more difficult than writing the paper itself. We’ve all been told from the beginning: write, edit, edit again, have someone else edit. We aren’t usually told what this means, or what exactly we are supposed to change. So, for those of us who write our paper and have no idea what to do to make it better, here’s a few tips.

1)      Use Active Verbs

A lot of professors will throw this tip out at you in the middle of class. “Get rid of your ‘be’ verbs,” they’ll say. “Get rid of the passive voice.” Doing that is a lot harder than they make it seem. To make it easier on you, one way to do this is reverse the entire sentence. Instead of saying something along the lines of, “There are many ways to create diversity,” change the order of your sentence to, “Diversity is created in many ways.” The whole point of the professor’s recommendation isn’t to eliminate your “be” verbs, it’s only to allow you to write in such a way that your subjects are doing some sort of action, making the paper more interesting.

2)      Throw In Some Adjectives

You can only use the word “small” so many times when you’re talking about microbiology, and you can only say “psychological” so many times when talking about psychology. Spice it up. Throw in some words that you may not have known the definition to minutes ago. If you’re looking at your paper right now and there are no adjectives, then add some. Instead of saying, “The small planet goes the wrong way next to the star,” say “The planet, dwarfed by its neighboring star, rotates in the opposite direction.” It may seem like an obvious, small fix, but needless to say, it makes all the difference. Keeping your reader’s attention is the first step to getting a good grade. Think about all the papers they’ve had to read by the time they happened upon yours.

3)      But Don’t Get Wordy

There is a very fine line between writing a solid paper that has interesting wording and writing a rambling, adjective-full dialogue that loses the reader’s interest. For example, take this sentence: “The overly exuberant, blackish tan dog would actively sprint in continuous abstract ovals around the red and green Frisbee in order to find an accurate, subliminal path to catch said Frisbee mid-air, and off he would run with it, leaping forward.” Yes, this sentence has a lot of good words in it, and it may pass in a creative writing class, but if you handed this to a professor, they would cringe. They would also wonder if you know the meaning of the word “subliminal”. One of the signs of a good writer is restraint. Cut out the unnecessary, over-the-top language. You may think overdoing it is going to make you sound intelligent, but saying much with few words sounds even better. So how do we fix this sentence? “The exuberant dog would sprint in circles around the Frisbee before catching it mid-air.” sounds much more appropriate for a formal essay. It’s short, sweet, to-the-point, and look, you still have the word “exuberant” to display your vocabulary.

4)      Clean Up Your Quotes

Quoting in articles is almost always awkward. They always sound out of place, or as if you copy and pasted a mess of words into the middle of your paper to make word count. Most likely, that’s exactly what you did, but there is an easy way to make quotes sound natural. The key to quoting is your leading sentence. Let’s say you want to use the quote, “Life is either a great adventure or nothing.” Leading into the quote, try to copy the writing style slightly. This quote is simple, but it’s written very formally, so try to copy those elements. For example, say something along the lines of, “A life unlived is often referenced as one wasted. As Helen Keller once famously stated, ‘A life is either a great adventure or nothing.’” Let your first sentence lead into the quote as if you, yourself, wrote the quote. If your quote is short, don’t write a lengthy, wordy sentence beforehand. Make sure it is relevant to what you’re saying, and if it isn’t, find another quote.

5)      Use Transitions

Nothing makes you sound more intelligent than a few well-placed “however”s, “needlessly”s, and “in conclusion”s. By adding a couple transition words throughout your paper, you’re not only upping your word count in most cases (hallelujah) but you’ve also just made yourself sound very in control of your topic. These words help the reader smoothly move from one subject to the next, and it adds the perfect amount of flare to your writing style. For example, the difference between these two sentences is pretty clear:

“Everyone said the task was impossible. However, so-and-so completed it perfectly.”

“Everyone said the task was impossible, but so-and-so completed it perfectly.”

6)      Pull Out The Thesaurus

By using a thesaurus well, you can add a couple of smart words into your paper to make yourself sound even smarter. Let me show you what happens when I use the thesaurus to rewrite that previous sentence: By using a thesaurus artfully, you are permitted to include intelligent terms in your paper in order to make yourself sound even cleverer.  See the difference?