How to Revise an Essay: 4 Simple Steps

The Differences Between Revising, Editing and Proofreading an Essay 

Before answering how to revise an essay, you should understand what revising, editing, and proofreading are. Since even experienced college essay writers often confuse these concepts, we decided to explain their main differences as concisely as possible.

• Revisions can help you get the bigger picture and put yourself in the shoes of your essay’s reader. Here, you should evaluate:

1. sections on compliance with your general topic and logical links between them;
2. quotes, facts, statistics, data relevance, and so on.

• Editing implies only working on single sentences and parts of a body paragraph. You need to ensure clarity and consistency of your narration and remove phrases that do not make sense.
• Essay proofreading means that you work with single words and phrases. Here, your main task is to eliminate punctuation, spelling, and grammatical errors.

NB: support of automatic verification software is good, but it will never replace human text checking.

Important Questions to Ask Yourself When Revising an Essay

You must have a list of key questions you can use during essay revision. There are dozens of them, and it’s easy to get confused. But don’t worry – below, you can find the key questions our college paper writing service has prepared especially for you.

1. Is the word choice clear and easy-to-understand?
2. Does each sentence correspond to style requirements?
3. How relevant is the data provided?
4. Does your text contain an understandable thesis?
5. Is your essay well-structured?
6. Do all sections of your essay come with logical transitions?
7. Do sentences contain grammatical, spelling, or punctuation errors?
8. How can one cut the essay volume and make it more concise?
9. How unique is your text?

4 Steps of Essay Revising

Now, when you know about revision process steps and how it is different from proofreading or editing, it's time to go directly to the point.

When you write an essay, you should consider 4 basic rules, namely:

• always reach your essay’s main ideas that you set at the very beginning;
• create your essay’s outline sequentially and without logical gaps;
• use only the language corresponding to your essay’s style;
• focus on reliable data that can be checked and confirmed.

Keep reading to learn more or buy an essay or order editing from professionals.

Step 1: Look at the Purpose of Your Essay

When you revise essay, this step is always the same, regardless of your work’s style or subject. It also doesn’t matter if your revision is aimed at moving readers to a certain conclusion, providing a description of some research results, or describing technological processes. 

You should be 100% sure that your main purpose is achieved. In what way can it be done? Just put yourself in the reader's place and try to outline your main idea in a few sentences. 

You should double-check an assignment sheet and feedback (if there is any) to make sure you have addressed each point of instruction. Also, you should bear out that all essay tasks are completed.

Step 2: Check the Structure and Organisation

At this stage, you should perform your essay’s structure evaluation and make a paragraph revision. Check how logical all arguments are and how they are distributed from the introduction to conclusions. Pay attention to how easy-to-read your material is since it directly impacts your essay’s overall impression.

Don’t use phrases with similar meanings, and better replace them with transition sentences for improving the structure of an essay.

At this stage, many underestimate the importance of intuition. If you read the sentence and feel that it’s out of context, then it probably is.

Step 3: Pay Attention to Structure and Formatting

At this step, you continue revising a paragraph, paying attention to the references, use of quotes, etc.

Your text may be ideally written in terms of content and contain reliable scientific data. But if you don’t bother paying attention to formatting errors or going over the allowed word limit, your entire essay may suffer.

Here, you should carefully examine points from a document that regulates formatting rules and always follow them.

Please, focus on eliminating the following incorrections:

• Font size and font style
• Margins
• Spacing
• Confusing structure
• Improper layout formatting.

Step 4: Focus on Coherence and Content

This is the last step of the revision essay, aimed at polishing your text and making it coherent. Each paragraph and section of your essay should be relevant and make sense. Check how clearly all your arguments are described, whether they contain semantic mistakes, if they come with adequate quoting, etc.

As a result, your readers can smoothly move from the beginning to the end without a pause. They don’t need to stop in order to put together essay sections like separate pieces of a puzzle.

How to Revise an Essay: Extra Tips

Below, you’ll find info on the most useful tips to help you smoothly revise in a sentence. We prepared only universal tips for essays on any topic. Another peculiarity is that they’re not related to writing itself. 

You’ve surely heard about some of these tips or even used them in practice but haven’t paid attention to others. Just a few minutes of reading will help you become fluent in content polishing techniques, so feel free and keep scrolling.

1. Read an Essay Out Loud

When you revise paper works, read them out loud, especially if they’re long. When you work with a large document, your brain quickly gets tired and switches to energy-saving mode. In this case, you may not pay attention to some incorrect wording in one of your paragraphs. Probably, you may skip even the whole line and not notice that at all.

In addition, this technique helps to check your text again for grammatical or spelling errors.

2. Give It a Time

While revising a paper, try not to do everything in one day, especially if you deal with a large text or have tough deadlines. 

In this case, it’s important to plan the work in such a way that you have one day left exclusively for revision.

Keep in mind that morning is the best time for revision. You can focus on revising with a fresh mind and once again check how relevant your work is.

3. Get Feedback From Another Reader

Going through tips on how to revise a paper, keep in mind that sometimes it’s teamwork. If you’re an essay creator, then you can hardly be a judge of your work at the same time. 

In fact, many shortcomings obvious for another reader will be blurred in your head. So find a third party, let them read your text, and then explain what the main purpose of your work is. Readers should understand it and decide whether it has been achieved or not.

4. Check for Plagiarism

During revising essays, the use of unique content is a must. Plagiarism is unacceptable, regardless of your essay’s topic or style you used during writing. 

Currently, there are a lot of appropriate applications that provide a necessary level and depth of your paper check.

Before checking, you should once again read all conditions for submitting your essay. As a rule, they provide information regarding the acceptable level of quoting which should not be exceeded.

How to Revise an Essay: Key Takeaways

Summing up, we can say that this article contains an exhaustive answer for writers wondering how to revise essay.

We’ve described the basic nuances about how to structure and organize your essay. Now, you also know how you can form a purpose and check how clear it is.

We hope that reading the list of questions will help you master revision skills. Using information from our tips, you can go through 4 revising steps seamlessly and without a headache.