Editing
After you are satisfied with the ideas and organization in your paper, carefully reread your writing in order to identify and eliminate surface errors related to grammar, usage, and mechanics. The last step in the writing process, proper editing enhances the scholarliness and professionalism of a paper.
Academic Tone
Your essay must be written in "academic tone." This instruction on an assignment sheet might make you nervous. What is academic writing? Some students think that it needs to "sound smart," so they replace words using MS Word's thesaurus (sound familiar?), making the writing sound pompous and, at times, incoherent. Others don't even pretend to have a clue and write as they normally would (think "I write like I talk.").
Like other forms of writing, "academic" simply implies that you must tailor your word choice and sentence structure to a specific audience. Just as you would use appropriate language if you were writing a Facebook message to a friend--or a angry text to an ex--you should use language that is recognizable and suitable for an academic audience.
Above all else, academic writing shoud contain:
- Word choice that is clear and concise
- Varied sentence structure
Personal Pronouns
How many times have you heard "Never use 'I' or 'you' in a paper"? Probably a lot if you've ever taken a writing class. Instructors typically demand that their students refrain from using first and second-person pronouns to help them maintain credibility and clarity.
Like everything else in writing, though, there are exceptions to this rule, depending on audience, context, and purpose.
Contractions
Punctuation
Punctuation has a bad reputation: it's difficult to figure out and seems (to some) to have no rhyme or reason. Really, though, punctuation has a lot to offer. Simple uses of punctuation can help separate or group words and ideas, force readers to speed up or slow down, and clarify your meanings. A little bit of punctuation goes a long way! Before you begin adding in commas willy-nilly, you should understand when they are required, optional, and not allowed. Similarly, you should know that colons introduce information while semicolons can connect closely related sentences--as well as separate items in a list--and dashes and hyphens are not the same at all!
