When you have been working long and hard on an essay, you might feel the pressure to hand it in without proofreading it. This is never a good idea. While the pressure of coursework is a reality for every student, college professors expect to receive a perfect essay every time. According to Studybay writing expert Angelina Grin, if you proofread your paper before handing it in, your professor will be much more impressed with its quality.

The good news for students today is that with everything being so digitized and available online, you can easily find a budget-friendly service to help you easily proofread your essay. These tools will help you identify grammar, spelling, punctuation, and sentence structure mistakes and recommend how to correct them before submitting the essay to your professor or teacher.

Below are some tips on how to easily proofread an essay:

Pay Attention to The Introduction And Conclusion

The introduction and conclusion are very important but often neglected parts of the essay. Make sure you go through your introduction and conclusion sentence by sentence to check for any grammar, spelling, or punctuation mistakes.

You can also use this time to add some interesting facts or tidbits to your essay to make it more compelling, such as a quote, a historical event, or a piece of statistics.

Here are a few rules to bear in mind when proofreading your introduction and conclusion:

• In the introduction, make sure you grab your reader’s attention and let them know what the essay is about.
• In the conclusion, make sure you leave your reader with something to think about and let them know what the essay was about.
• Make sure the introduction and conclusion are connected to your topic, that they are not too long or too short, and that they have correct spelling and grammar.
• An introduction that is too long will make your readers lose interest. An introduction that is too short will make your essay seem incomplete.

Check For Grammar Mistakes

Start by reading through your essay and looking for any obvious errors that need to be corrected. If you find any, simply correct them and move on to the next section.

If you are looking for more in-depth grammar checks, use a tool like Word’s spelling and grammar check. Most word processing programs come with a built-in grammar checker that can be very helpful. Another option is to find a trusted source online where you can copy and paste your essay to be checked. Most professionals use Grammarly, but there are many websites that let you paste in your essay and then give you feedback on the mistakes that need to be fixed. You can search google for ‘websites to proofread my essay’ to find and use one of these websites.

Online dictionaries are also great at catching grammar mistakes because they have examples of every word used in a sentence. Go through your essay, looking at every word, and make sure that it’s being used correctly. You can also use a thesaurus to look for better word choices. Sometimes you might select the wrong word, and it changes the entire meaning of your sentence.

Check For Spelling, Punctuation, And Capitalization

A professor can overlook certain errors in your essay, but hardly ever will you find a professor who is willing to overlook spelling mistakes. To your professor, spelling mistakes not only make you look sloppy but also less intelligent.

If you are using Microsoft Word, you can find the spell-check tool under the ‘Review’ tab. It would be best if you also used Grammarly or a similar tool, as the spell checker on Word isn’t thorough. Grammarly’s functionality extends beyond spell checking and allows you to check other factors such as grammar and sentence structure.

Punctuation marks help make the meaning of a sentence clear and easy to understand by separating each part of the sentence into its own group.  When writing an essay, it is important to use commas, periods, and semicolons correctly because they help make the meaning of sentences clear and easier for readers to understand them correctly.

You should also check for any capitalization mistakes such as missing capital letters at the beginning of sentences, titles, and names, or incorrect capitalization such as “I.” You should enable automatic capitalization in the options section of your word processor to ensure your essays are using proper capitalization.

Make Sure You Have No Sentence Fragments

A sentence fragment is one that has no verb or subject. In dialogue, sentence fragments are common because they accurately represent how people speak. Although they don’t translate over very well in formal writing, sentence fragments aren’t necessarily wrong or ungrammatical.

However, your professor might not entertain sentence fragments in your essays. When proofreading an essay, keep in mind that each sentence needs to have a complete thought. A complete thought means that the sentence has a subject and a verb. Most sentence fragments can be fixed by adding a comma, a semicolon, a subject, or a verb.

Here’s an example: ‘Going for a walk outside. This is a sentence fragment because it doesn’t have a complete thought. To make it into a complete thought, you would need to add the subject ‘I’ and the auxiliary verb ‘am’ so that the new sentence reads as follows ‘I am going for a walk outside.

Check For Plagiarism

Plagiarism is the act of copying someone else’s work and passing it off as your own. Most professors consider plagiarism a serious academic offense. It is important to avoid plagiarism in your essay because it will affect your grade, destroy your credibility and your reputation as a student, and affect your chances of success at your school.

Acts of plagiarism include:

• Copying from the internet
• Copying from other students
• Copying from books or journals
• Paraphrasing without referencing
• Using direct quotes without referencing
• Using direct quotes with no quotation marks and incorrect referencing

When writing an essay, it is important to footnote or reference any information that you use from other sources.  You should also make sure that you cite all your sources correctly so as to avoid any plagiarism mistakes.

Check Your Essay for Coherence And Sense

Coherence is the ability to connect ideas and make them flow smoothly.  Cohesion is the ability to make your ideas fit together well. Coherence and cohesion begin with the structure of your essay.

When writing a paper or an essay, the most important element is the thesis statement or main idea. If you have a thesis statement, you will have a strong foundation for your essay. In order to create good evidence for your thesis statement, you should state your topic clearly in the introduction. It should sufficiently describe the topic without giving too much information that would make readers lose interest in what you are going to write about later on in your essay.

The next thing you should do is check whether you have properly explained all the main points in your essay. The key ideas should stand out, and they should be backed by evidence where necessary. If you have mixed up different ideas under one subheading, transition them into each other in a way that makes sense. Better yet, split them up into different subheadings.

Simple use of transition words like ‘more so,’ ‘in addition,’ ‘however,’ ‘but,’ ‘in contrast,’ etcetera will help you to connect ideas and strengthen the flow of your essay.

Read Your Essay Out Loud

Nobody wants to read an essay that has a bunch of mistakes. Proofreading will make reading your essay easier and more enjoyable, which will probably help you get more marks on your essay.

After you are done checking for grammatical errors, spelling, punctuation, and capitalization; sentence fragments and plagiarism; and coherence and cohesion, you should read your work out loud. This helps with flow and rhythm. It also lets you hear if there are any awkward phrasing or pronunciations. You may notice mistakes like missing words or double spaces when you read it aloud.

If you find a sentence that sounds awkward but aren’t sure how else to phrase it, don’t try to fix it then and there. Instead, put the sentence in a Word document or on a piece of paper, and come back to it later. Sometimes, it’s easier to spot mistakes when your eyes aren’t focused on the screen. Step away, come back later and make final edits on your essay when your mind is fresh. This way, you’ll stand a better chance of handing in a perfect copy!

Final Words: How Long Does It Take to Proofread An Essay?

While we can tell you how to proofread an essay, I cannot tell you how long it takes to proofread one.

Essay proofreading isn’t exactly a walk in the park, but it is a necessary part of academic life. The experience you will have proofreading your essay will depend on the amount of work you put into writing the first draft.

If your first draft isn’t well-researched and well-written, you will most likely have to endure a longer proofreading session. On the other hand, if, as advised in this article, you start by writing a well-structured essay,  you will have a much easier time.