Essay Editing Checklist: 15 Things to Check Before You Submit

You have hit the word count, the deadline is close, and the temptation is to upload the document and stop thinking about it. Resist that for an hour or two. Marks rarely leak away in the first draft of an argument; they leak away in the small, fixable things — an uncited quotation, a paragraph that wanders, a reference list that does not match the citations in the text. What follows is a working checklist of fifteen checks, arranged so you can work through them in a sensible order. Start with the structural ones, because there is no point polishing sentences you are about to delete.

Structure and argument

Begin with the shape of the essay, not the wording. Most serious problems live here, and they are much cheaper to fix now than at midnight.

• 1. Does the essay answer the question that was actually set? Read the brief again, slowly. Underline the directive words — compare, evaluate, to what extent — and check that your essay performs that verb and not a neighbouring one. An essay that analyses when it was asked to evaluate will lose marks however elegant the prose.
• 2. Does the introduction do its job? It should set out your position or line of argument and indicate the route you take to get there. If it promises three areas and you cover four, change one of them.
• 3. Does every paragraph earn its place? If a paragraph could be lifted out without the essay noticing, ask whether it is doing work or filling space.
• 4. Does the conclusion conclude? It should draw together what the evidence showed. A brilliant new point that appears in the last paragraph either belongs earlier or belongs in a different essay.

Paragraph flow

Readers, especially tired markers, navigate by paragraph. Make that easy and your argument feels stronger than it is.

• 5. Read only the first sentence of each paragraph, in order. Together they should give a rough summary of your case. If they do not, your topic sentences need work.
• 6. Check the seams between paragraphs. Watch for vague link words. "This shows that..." — what does "this" refer to? Name it: "The staffing figures suggest that..."
• 7. Compare the space given to quotation with the space given to analysis. A long block quote followed by two lines of comment leaves the thinking to the reader. Introduce, quote briefly, then explain what the evidence shows and why it matters.

Sentences, grammar and punctuation

This is the stage where a careful editor differs from a nervous one. You are checking, not rebuilding. Resist the urge to rewrite whole passages at this point.

• 8. Vary sentence length. If four sentences in a row run past thirty words, the reader drifts. Break one in two and the paragraph lifts immediately.
• 9. Hunt the usual suspects. Comma splices, its and it's, apostrophes in plurals (the 1990s, not the 1990's), dangling modifiers, and tense drift when you move between discussing a source and making your own point.
• 10. Cut the padding. "Due to the fact that" becomes "because". "In order to" becomes "to". "It is important to note that" usually disappears altogether.

Before: "It could be argued that the policy was, in many respects, not entirely successful in achieving its stated aims."
After: "The policy largely failed on its own terms."

The second version is shorter, more confident and easier to argue with — which is exactly what you want from a claim.

Referencing

Referencing errors are the most common avoidable losses in student essays. They are also the quickest to spot.

• 11. Run a two-way check. Every in-text citation should appear in the reference list, and every item in the list should be cited somewhere in the text. Do this with a finger on the screen or a pen on paper; scanning is not the same as checking.
• 12. Check the details your style guide cares about. Confirm which style your department uses, then look at the specifics: page numbers for direct quotations, italics for titles of whole works, quotation marks for chapters and articles, hanging indents, alphabetical order. Using one style consistently but the wrong one is a smaller problem than mixing two.

Formatting and presentation

• 13. Word count and layout. Check whether the limit includes quotations, footnotes or the reference list, and follow the stated convention. Then check font, size, line spacing, margins and page numbers. If the essay is marked anonymously, remove your name from the header, the footer and the document properties.
• 14. File name and format. Submit the file type you were asked for. Give the document a name you would be happy to see in a folder of two hundred others: Module_Essay1_Final.docx, not essay final final v3.docx.

The last proofread

15. Read for typos and consistency, and read differently. Reading silently in your head fills gaps with what you meant to write. Read aloud, or read the final sentence of each paragraph first and work backwards. Use the search function to check the spelling of names, the formatting of numbers and any term you suspect you have styled two ways. If you are studying in the UK, set your spellchecker to British English and decide early whether you are using -ise or -ize endings, single or double quotation marks, per cent or %. Pick one and hold it throughout.

Before you press submit

If the deadline allows, leave the essay alone for a few hours, or overnight. Distance does more for your error-spotting than any amount of staring. When you come back, work through the fifteen checks above in order, then stop. Further fiddling past that point mostly moves words around without improving them.

Print it if you can — errors behave differently on paper — read the first page and the last page carefully, confirm the file is the right one, and submit. A clean, well-structured essay that answers the question will always do better than a more ambitious one nobody can follow.

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