5. Checking

Looking over and reviewing your work is crucial. Once you’ve drafted and polished your essay you need to check it for errors. Even highly experienced writers check their work for faults and blunders. These can be technical mistakes, such as typos, misspellings, formatting problems, or even factual inaccuracies. They can also be errors in articulation: sentences that don’t make sense, vague wording, grammatical slips, wordiness, accidental repetitions. And then there are larger, less tangible questions of structure to deal with: the proportioning between the main body of your discussion, on the one hand, and your introduction and conclusion, on the other; the long ‘arc’ of your argument. Very few writers can get all of these things in an ideal order, but the most committed writers always make the effort to.

An essay that has been tidied up is much more likely to score a higher mark than one which contains lingering, removable mistakes. My main bit of advice is to leave sufficient time to check your work. By ‘sufficient’ I mean ‘more than a few hours’. Ideally you need enough time for the essay to have gone out of your head, for it to have become slightly strange, so that you can pay fresh attention to it. The precise amount of time will differ from person to person. Choose the amount of time that works for you—but always build that time into your planning, if you can. Depending on your circumstances you may need longer than other students to check your work, or to have help from someone else in proofreading it.

Tips
- aim to finish writing your essay at least a few days before your deadline
- if you can, check your work in a different physical space from where you wrote it; or, if this isn’t possible, at a different time of day from when you tended to write it
- before checking your essay, reformat it to a different font and font size from the font and font size in which you wrote it: this will make errors stick it out in a new way and easier to notice
- if you feel comfortable doing so, give the work to someone else to read (a friend, a family member)
- over time, keep a list of errors in your work that you routinely make, and search for these as a matter of course in your future efforts

And, finally: good luck!