How to Edit a College Essay
Written by Ali Pineo
Editing is a necessary step in the writing process—no one (read: NO ONE) writes a perfect first draft. In fact, you should spend the majority of your time in the editing phase, which requires you to navigate major revisions, paragraph- and sentence-level changes, and smaller edits like spelling, grammar, typos, and other minor errors.
I liken editing to putting together a Target bookshelf. You’re given a tiny allen wrench and many different sized screws (or sometimes just wooden pegs?!) to hold together the walls and shelves. Place a shelf in the wrong spot or tighten too aggressively, and none of the holes match up. Don’t tighten enough, and the shelves wobble. But if you tighten the screws gradually, in coordination with each new installed piece, your bookshelf can stand on its own and bear weight.
In this guide, you’ll learn to tweak and tighten the main elements of your essay in coordination with its corresponding parts: content, focus, organization, and clarity/style. By doing so, you’ll ensure structural integrity and create an essay that is cohesive and strong enough to bear the weight of your arguments and ideas.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Where to begin: How to identify problem spots in your essay
The content checklist
Important questions to focus your argument(s)
The reverse outline
Six tips for up-leveling your clarity and style
How to decide when your paper is done
WHERE TO BEGIN
This might seem counter-intuitive, but cast your critical writing gaze to the side for a moment. Imagine you are Virginia Woolf’s “common reader,” someone who is receptive and open to the writing in front of you. In this new role, track your reading experience—are you bored, engaged, unconvinced, or inspired?
Noticing how you feel at different points in a text can help you identify what you’ve done well and what could use improvement. If you’re engaged or inspired, you’ve probably woven ethos, pathos, and logos together to articulate a compelling argument. If you’re confused or disengaged, you might be making logical jumps, lacking a clear organizational structure, or using a florid writing style.
Being sensitive to your writing through an outside eye gives you that superpower you’ve most likely seen your professors expertly wield—the ability to intuitively discern between “strong” and “weak” writing with ease. By tapping into your “common reader,” your aim is to objectively approach your writing from a distance and pinpoint where to begin the editing process.
THE CONTENT CHECKLIST
I usually begin by looking at content. Build a content list, similar to the assembly list for your bookshelf, to evaluate the arguments and ideas you’ve generated thus far.
Make sure you have:
☐ Answered the prompt
☐ A clear introduction with the appropriate contextual information to set up your argument
☐ Remember, a key part of your intro is your thesis statement (Check out “What Makes a Good Argument” for an in depth guide)
☐ Body paragraphs with…
☐ Topic sentences
☐ Transitions between ideas
☐ Evidence + analysis
☐ Conclusion sentences
☐ A conclusion that doesn’t just summarize or wrap up the ideas you’ve put forth but also extends beyond them to actually draw conclusions
Spotlight: Evidence and Analysis
Your evidence and analysis make up a huge chunk of your paper’s content. As a good rule of thumb, you should have at least three pieces of evidence per argument (some claims require more evidence), and your analysis should be at least double the length of the evidence you selected (See “Writing from Sources” for a more in depth look).
For example:
If you include a 5-line block quote and have only one interesting thing to say about it, you can probably narrow down that textual evidence to a sentence or a few words.
Or perhaps you found one line of textual evidence and have many insights to share and unpack—you’ve probably found a really strong piece of evidence.
Striking a balance between succinct evidence and compelling analysis is key. An imbalance can occur when you prioritize someone else’s ideas over your own. By keeping the 1:2 ratio of evidence to analysis, your unique ideas can shine and be the main contributing voice to the essay.
You might be asking, “shouldn’t this type of evaluation happen earlier in the writing process?” Our answer: You’d be surprised how things like topic and conclusion sentences (and even compelling analysis) can be totally absent even after multiple revisions by expert and novice writers alike. Assessing your content repeatedly and often will ensure you include all the key parts, which can then be further assessed for focus in the next step of this guide.
IMPORTANT QUESTIONS TO FOCUS YOUR ARGUMENT(S)
While writing, it’s easy to get lost in the woods of your argument(s) (even with a clear outline!), and it’s even harder to retrace your steps and acknowledge you’ve diverged from the main trail for a little too long. Three simple questions can help you get back on track and assess if your paper maintains a clear focus.
Ask yourself:
Does my paper answer the prompt and/or make a claim?
Does each paragraph serve a purpose in supporting that claim? Follow up: Is that purpose made clear to your reader?
Does each sentence contribute to the main idea or argument of its paragraph?
Another good test for evaluating your essay’s focus is to compile the first and last sentences of each paragraph. The compilation should read like a short summary of your paper. If it does, great!
If there are gaps or missing connections, here’s a good strategy to remedy the issue:
Go back to your supporting arguments and make sure they travel from topic sentence to conclusion sentence without any logical jumps.
Have each topic sentence refer back to the conclusion sentence from the previous paragraph to show the connection between supporting arguments.
Make sure the conclusion sentence of your supporting arguments or section connects back to the thesis.
THE REVERSE OUTLINE
My favorite tool to assess an essay’s organization is the reverse outline. While an outline is usually constructed during the prewriting phase, a reverse outline occurs after the essay has been written. This exercise can be helpful in revealing how your thoughts and arguments have evolved since that initial outline and whether you’ve presented those new ideas accurately.
The outline can be simple:
Place your thesis at the top→Write out your supporting arguments as headings→Organize your sub arguments under those headings.
You’ll see pretty quickly if the ideas are grouped correctly or if you need to make some adjustments.
Other things to think about:
When writing a comparison essay, moving from similarity to difference often makes for a stronger argument.
For analytical essays, your arguments should build, generally leaving your strongest, most compelling argument for last.
SIX TIPS FOR UP-LEVELING YOUR CLARITY AND STYLE
Clarity and style are distinct: clarity refers to whether your writing is easy to understand and effectively communicates your message, while style refers to the unique characteristics of your writing (ie. Does it have a nice flow? Is it enjoyable to read? Is it engaging?). But these two elements of writing should also work in sync—writing that is easy to understand and enjoyable to read should be your aim.
If clarity and style still feel like elusive, abstract things you’re grasping at in the dark, not to worry—I’ve compiled my top 3 tips for clarity and style that will help your writing as you develop stronger understanding.
Clarity
Put your subject and verb at the beginning of sentences. It’s a heck of a lot easier to understand a sentence’s meaning when the actor is placed next to its action (bonus: you’ll avoid using the passive voice).
Not clear: While dancing, Emily, by injuring her ankle and subsequently being taken out of the ballet and losing her lead role, questioned whether she should pursue dance as a career.
Clear: Emily injured her ankle while dancing and lost her lead role in the ballet. She questioned whether pursuing a career in dance was a good decision.
Make sure the subjects/actors are people (or short concrete nouns) as opposed to abstract nouns or phrases. This helps with visualization—it’s a lot easier to visualize a person doing an action rather than an inanimate object or abstract idea verb-ing.
Noun phrase as subject: The cause of some peoples’ anxiety is not knowing what will happen in the future.
Concrete noun as subject: Some people feel anxiety because they don’t know what the future holds.
Use stronger/clearer verbs in place of prepositional phrases, and avoid empty sentence openings. Using too many prepositional phrases can make your reader have to work really hard to decode the meaning of the sentence (you can almost always replace excessive preposition use with a verb, which contributes to a stronger, clearer voice!).
Wordy: The point I wish to make is that the kitchen staff at Marcket62 is in need of a much better manager.
Concise: The Marcket62 kitchen staff needs a better manager.
Style
In general, start each sentence within a paragraph with a reference to the subject/main idea of the sentence before it. By moving from familiar to unfamiliar information within each sentence, you create better flow from line to line, leading to a more pleasant read (IMHO).
Use varied sentence structures: a combination of long and short sentences; simple, compound, and complex sentences; and short sentences introduced by -ing or -ed modifiers (ex. Satisfied with her performance, Alice celebrated by eating ice cream.) Diverse sentence structures bring your writing to life through dynamic and unpredictable rhythms and patterns.
Generally make sure your sentences are less than three lines—long, fancy sentences can contribute to confusing style. Unless it’s very well written, it’s hard to keep three lines’ worth of info in your head! Don’t make your reader work that hard. ;)
HOW TO DECIDE WHEN YOUR PAPER IS DONE
Checklist:
☐ Make sure your essay’s contents are accounted for–especially the evidence and your analysis, which are usually the most crucial elements of your essay. (Both for your growth as a writer, and for your grade.)
☐ Evaluate the focus of your essay by asking yourself: does each sentence and paragraph contribute to supporting my thesis?
☐ Use a reverse outline to assess the organization of your main arguments and ideas. Without clear organization, your essay is just a compilation of disparate thoughts.
☐ Edit for style and clarity to boost your ethos, inject personality into your delivery, and communicate the effort and thoughtfulness of your approach to the work.
I wish I could tell you that you’ll know your essay is “done” when your common reader starts shouting “Your essay’s perfect! You can stop writing!” (gosh, wouldn’t that be nice?). Personally, my stopping point is a conscious choice to suspend my act of tightening based on the sense that I’ve made the best writing decisions in the time allotted to me. Sure, I could continue to tweak and modify endlessly. Instead, I choose to remember what Someone Really Smart once said: “Writing is never done. It’s just due.”
Special thanks to Ali Pineo for writing this post and contributing to other College Writing Center resources
Ali is a college essay specialist with her BA in English from Stanford University and MFA from UC Irvine. She has spent thousands of hours coaching admissions essays and helping students to build their confidence in the writing process. In addition to essay coaching, she is a former professional ballerina and current co-artistic director for Maui’s contemporary dance company Adaptations Dance Theater. She is a hybrid writer-dancer who enjoys the power of storytelling.
