Pay close attention to any places where you stumble in your reading. Examine what it is about a sentence that leads you to stumble — a missing word, a shift in tenses, awkward phrasing — and then revise accordingly.
Editing your work is complicated by the fact that you have a good idea of what you meant when you wrote each sentence of your draft. Consequently you read your sentences differently from someone who is coming to your paper fresh. To put yourself more into the position of your reader, take a break before you begin to edit. After a break you will be more likely to recognize problems that interfere with understanding your ideas.
In general, it is easier to edit individual sentences in isolation from other parts of an essay. For this reason some writers choose to do their final edit one sentence at a time starting from the end of the paper, rather than from the beginning.
Friends, relatives and other students can read your essay and point out the places that they think require editing. However, you should not accept these readers’ suggestions without question. It is better to use their suggestions as starting points for identifying problems in your draft and then to make your own decision about what changes, if any, would be most appropriate.
There are many good guides to the writing process, and these guides usually contain a reference section on grammar, sentence structure and punctuation. Having a copy of one of these guides handy provides a means to quickly check possible sentence errors. For a list of such writing guides available in the library, see
Writing Guides.
Click on the sections below for some effective general strategies for the editing process.