So you’ve finished writing your academic paper. Congratulations! Now it’s time to roll up your sleeves and start editing.
Writing an academic paper is such a huge task. Once you’re finished you’d like to be really finished. But there’s still one more task: editing. The good news is that editing can be easier than writing–if you know where to start. This 3-step guide will get you well on your way to preparing your academic paper for submission. Keep an eye out for our advanced guide which goes further into the nitty-gritty of editing.
Step #1: Figure Out Your Formatting
When editing your paper you must examine your writing for both content and correctness, but you also need to think about your formatting. Formatting has to do with how your paper looks. You want the various sections of your paper to be clearly marked using chapter titles, headings, and page breaks. You also want to make your paper easy to navigate. Your reader should be able to locate your tables, chapters, and references with ease.
It’s best to think about your formatting before you begin to read through your paper. If you have a formatting strategy in place, you can easily apply it as you read through your paper to make other edits.
How to Devise a Formatting Strategy:
- First, refer to templates or instructions provided by your advisor, professor, or institution. Ultimately your formatting requirements are determined by someone else. Find these instructions and read them carefully. What type of font are you meant to use? Where should page numbers go? Should you include a table of contents?
- Apply global formatting changes. Global formatting changes include things that affect your whole document such as font size, font type, spacing, and page numbers. Make these changes now.
- Set your heading style so you can format your headings as you read through your paper. If you’re working in Microsoft Word you can set your heading styles to match the template given to you by your institution, or to conform to APA style. Open up the “Styles Pane” in Word and set levels 1–4 (depending on how many levels you use) to match your requirements. As you read through your paper, apply these headings by highlighting your heading and applying the style.
- Turn on “invisible symbols.” When you type into a word document, you see visible symbols like letters and numbers. But there are also invisible symbols like spaces and tabs. To make sure these are correct, turn on invisible symbols by pressing the pilcrow symbol on Word (it looks like this: ¶). Your document will light up with blue dots and other symbols. Leave these on while you read through your paper in step #2.
Use invisible symbols to make sure you haven’t added extra spaces between words, and to make sure your document isn’t filled with unnecessary line breaks. Unnecessary line breaks often appear at the end of a chapter. When you are ready to move to the next chapter, use the “insert page break” function in Word rather than pressing the return key a bunch of times.
Step #2: Polish Your Prose
This is the most time-consuming step, but it’s essential. To edit your paper, you’ll need to read through the entire thing–every, single, word. Really, you should do this several times, and ask other people to take a look too.
As you read, think about two things: correctness and polish. First of all, you want your grammar and spelling to be correct. Some errors will be obvious and easy to correct, but others will require you to look things up. When it comes to spelling and word usage, a dictionary is the best reference. When it comes to questions of style, refer to your style guide (usually APA for academic papers). In either case, you can Google for information, but verify any information that comes up across several websites. University websites (such as the Purdue OWL) are especially trustworthy because they specialize in academic writing.
In addition to correct spelling and grammar, you want your writing to have a bit of finesse. This doesn’t mean you need to “decorate” your writing or try to make it sound overly complicated. In fact the opposite is often true: you want your writing to be as simple and direct as you can make it. Academic writing is about conveying ideas and information. The more simple and precise your writing, the more clear the ideas and information are to your reader.
Reading through your paper to tweak your language is like decluttering your desk. At the beginning of the process you’re faced with everything you need plus a lot of things you probably don’t need. Remove everything that is extraneous and incorrect, and make sure what’s left is in perfect order.
Step #3: Dig Into the Details
When you’re reading through your paper in step #2, it’s best to focus on your prose and leave some of the more detailed work for later. The detailed work includes things like double-checking your tables and figures, and formatting your reference entries. Formatting references requires a different frame of mind to reading through prose, and it can be helpful to keep the two processes separate while you’re in the editing process.
When you’ve finished reading through your paper, go through and double-check that your tables and figures are correctly formatted according to APA style. While you’re doing this, it’s a good idea to quickly scroll through your paper to make sure all the formatting changes were applied consistently. As you scroll, you might notice that you forgot to apply a page break before one of your chapters, or that one of your headings is spaced incorrectly.
The next step is a big one: make sure your reference entries are formatted correctly. This takes a lot of time, partly because academic papers include so many references but also because the formatting requirements for each source are so involved. Be prepared to look things up, and to make sure your DOIs are current. If you need help with this, the editors at Wise Oak are happy to step in.
Not-So-Extra Credit: Have Someone Else Look Over Your Paper
Writing is a human endeavor and humans make mistakes. As diligent as you are in completing these three steps, there will still be errors in your paper.
The best next-step is to have someone else look over your paper. This could be someone at your university like a fellow student or someone at the university writing center. It could also be a professional, like one of our editors at Wise Oak. Be wary of online citation generators, these often format your references incorrectly, but do have someone look over your paper. An extra set of eyes never hurts!
