College Essays - You're Never Too Old to Proofread

Proofreading is an essential part to your writing experience, and writing well-received college essays is a central part to your future career opportunities. For this reason there are several basic concepts that you should keep in mind when proofreading your essays. Well knowing these basic concepts make you the next great American writer, probably not, but they will allow you to change a C into a B, due to poor proofreading skills. The basic concepts are broken down into things that you can do before you proofread as well as what you should look for when you are actually proofreading your essay. And finally, what can you do when you're just not happy with that B and would like to turn it into an A.

Prior to sitting down to proofread your document and discover and correct the minor issues, you should first ensure that your document is correct on the major levels such as the focus, format, paragraph structure and length. Once you have verified that your paper is correct at the macro level, it is time to delve deeper into your essay. One way of using a little detective work is to look at submitted papers that have been returned and can provide a list of mistakes that you have committed previously. Use these mistakes as a guideline and examine your college essays for the same type of mistakes and correct them. This will give you a head start on finding common errors that you are prone to make.

Now that you're ready to proofread your document, don't. Take a short break from examining the document as this allows you to distance yourself from the work and give you a bit of detachment from your text. Working and reworking the same paragraphs can often lead to missing common errors as your mind corrects incorrect sentence structure. Once you've taken a bit of a break you should read your college essays out loud. This allows you to actually hear the text and is excellent for detecting run-on sentences. If you are using computer word processing software, there are tools available for spellchecking as well as grammar checking. These can be used to give you a head start correcting the errors that the software can detect. Note however, a spellchecker will only check for misspelled words. Incorrect words that are spelled correctly will not be flagged as errors.

So you spend all your time proofreading your document and submitted it only to be disappointed by a B for what you consider to be an effort. What can you do? You should learn more about the subtleties of the English language and how to make grammar work for you. At many colleges around the country there are writing centers which allow students to learn more about grammar rules and writing. These classes are an excellent opportunity for a student to increase their writing skills and reduce the amount of time that they spend rewriting and correcting grammatical errors on their college essays. If additional grammar classes are not available, there are a number of handbooks and texts on the correct use of grammar. These handbooks usually include a number of examples that illustrate common mistakes that can occur.

by Wade Knoxville - 20th March 2009

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Source: http://bb-articles.com

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