Read With a Fresh Pair of Eyes
To better identify problems with your writing, step away from your paper for a while before you enter an editing phase.
So, you’ve finally written your paper. You’ve presented your message, made your argument, and told your story. You’ve put all of your sentences and ideas together, composing them just the way you envisioned. But are you done? If you intend to submit the best paper you can, the answer, unfortunately, is no. You still need to edit your work.
When you plan your writing schedule, set aside some time after you’ve committed the bulk of your ideas to your paper for at least one round of editing -- the more rounds, the better. Writing and editing are two sides of the same coin. A writer’s job is to get their ideas committed to paper; an editor’s job is to evaluate the effectiveness of the writing and improve it as much as possible.
While it is always better to have someone else edit your writing, you won’t always have that luxury, so you’ll most likely edit your paper yourself. This can be quite difficult, because editing requires that you take a deeply critical eye to what’s been written, and isn’t easy to be critical about something that you’ve created yourself. When you spend days or weeks researching and writing a paper, you can become so mentally and intellectually invested in it that your brain starts to see what you wanted to write rather than what you actually had written: The mind’s eye can fill in words you thought you wrote, see logic when there is none, and fail to catch errors because it assumes they were never made.
To guard against this and better identify problems with your writing, step away from your paper for a while before you enter an editing phase. If it’s a longer-term assignment, put away your paper for at least a day before you start to edit. If it’s a shorter-term assignment, put it away for a few hours. Try not to think about it much. Purge it from your memory. The idea is for you to become that someone else who can look at your work with a fresh pair of eyes. In this way, you have a better chance of seeing what you actually wrote, not what you thought you wrote. You’ll be able to identify grammatical errors and leaps in logic more easily. You may be able to shore up any weaknesses that you couldn’t fix while you were writing the paper in an earlier phase of the project.
The editing phase is important because even if you have the most brilliant idea in the world, if your paper is written in such a way that your readers struggle to understand what you’re saying, that brilliant idea of yours runs the risk of getting lost in the delivery. In addition, with shoddy, unedited writing, even if your readers are patient enough to slog through your message and discern what you’re trying to say, they might not trust the quality of your idea because the quality of your presentation is wanting.
