Speaker 1: Hello, my name is Chelsea Seaburn. Welcome to The Smart Student. This channel is all about helping online college students and their online college programs. Today, I'm going to be talking about editing your academic papers so you can level up your writing and score as high as possible. Now, quick disclaimer before we jump in. This is a two-part video series about editing and proofreading. I only say this because these are two topics that often get confused. Since we're going to be focusing on editing, that means we're going to talk about meeting all the requirements in your paper, how to make your writing flow, which means we're going to pay attention to paragraph and sentence structure, making sure that you have adequate transitions between everything, and we're going to take a look at the general formatting. If you're looking for tips on how to look for things like spelling, grammar mistakes, punctuation, that's where you want to check out this video right here because that's going to be proofreading. But with no further ado, what do you say we go ahead and get started? All right, so first things first, I've created this checklist for you, which we're going to be going through in this video. If you want to download this and save it on your computer, you can find a link to it in the description down below. The way the checklist is set up is in a question formatting. So starting with the first question you should ask yourself when editing your papers is, does my paper meet all of the requirements asked of me in my assignment? I started with this question because in my opinion, this is the most important question you can ask yourself because time and time again, students miss points because they either didn't cover something that was asked of them, or they covered something that wasn't asked of them. So my pro tip for you here is that when you're editing your paper, you should always have either the assignment or the project rubric right next to your finished paper so that you can compare them side by side. So I don't know if you guys have ever paid attention, but when you get a writing assignment, a lot of times you're able to see the project rubric that your professor uses to grade you. And if you don't have access to a project rubric, then there's a good chance that your professor is just using your assignment to grade you. What you should take away from that is that when you're editing your paper, you want to look at it from the eyes of your professor. In other words, if they're using this rubric to grade you, then that's what you want to be looking at to ensure that you've met all those requirements in your assignment. You see, what I used to do is I actually used to create my section headings based off the project rubric that my professor would use to grade me. I would then refer to my assignment because it usually gave me more context and details about each section, but this was simply my foolproof method for how I would score really high on every single assignment I wrote. Now I don't have time to go into that right now, but if you'd like to watch the full video on either how to use section headings properly, or my tutorial on where I take an assignment and break it down using section headings, here are two videos you can check out on your own time. But moving on to the next question you should ask yourself, and that is, does my paper have a thesis? And is that thesis specific? By the way, if you're finding value in this video, be sure to give it a thumbs up, interact with it somehow. It's your guys' support of the Smart Student channel that allows me to keep doing what I do, so thank you so much. But anyways, back to the question. So you always want to identify your thesis statement when editing your paper because your thesis statement, it's the whole compass that guides the rest of your paper. Now to be clear, not every paper will have a formalized thesis statement. However, there will always be one to two sentences that clearly states what your paper is going to be about and how you're going to be discussing it. This could include the conclusions you come to, the theories you're going to discuss, the hypothesis you're either going to prove or disprove, or maybe the argument you're going to be making in your paper. As a rule of thumb, your thesis statement is usually located somewhere towards the end of your introduction. All right, but moving on, the next thing you want to ask yourself is, does everything in my paper relate back to my thesis? This is again where those section headings come in handy because they make sure you stay on topic. But even with section headings, you still want to take a few minutes and browse through your paper and make sure that the points you're making and the things you discuss do relate back to the purpose of your paper. It's very important that you didn't accidentally go down any rabbit holes or discuss topics that don't add to the purpose of your paper because this is going to take away from the material that does add to your paper. But moving on, next on the list is you want to ask yourself is, do you provide explanations for everything in your paper that is not common knowledge? So every time you write a paper, you want to write from the perspective that your reader has no idea what you're talking about. You never want to think to yourself, oh, I don't need to explain this. My professor knows what this means because again, if it's not common knowledge to the general public, then you want to provide some context. For example, I got my bachelor's and master's in business. I don't know how many times I wrote a SWOT analysis. Now, if you know what that is, great. I'm not going to explain it again here, but let me say this. I wrote SWOT analysis for at least six to 10 different courses. Every single time I did not think to myself, oh, my professor knows what a SWOT analysis, I don't need to explain what that is before I do one. Nope. I gave an explanation before every SWOT analysis. You see the purpose of academic writing is to demonstrate your knowledge on a given topic. So even though a theory or a vocabulary word might be common knowledge in your field of study, if someone off the street wouldn't know what it meant, go ahead and provide an explanation for it. This is just good academic writing 101 and it's how you ensure that you're thorough and don't miss anything important. All right. So those first questions are aimed at targeting the meat of your writing. And once you have that down on paper, now we're going to get into some questions that focus on the quality of your writing. So the first question you should ask yourself here is, does my paper flow in a logical order? In other words, do your points build off each other in a way that's going to maximize your reader's understanding? For example, notice how I'm feeding you the points in this video right now. They flow in a way that they build off each other and they make sense to you. Imagine if I started with say sentence transitions and then paragraph structure. And then I talked about meeting all the requirements. And then I talked about formatting your paper. And then I talked about your thesis statement and so on and so forth. I could be giving you my best work and the most value in the world, but in an order like that, you would be lost. So what you, the student wants to do is make sure that your paper is in order. So your professor is not lost. This is the last time I'm going to say this, I swear, but this is why section headings are so useful. But anyways, moving on. Now you want to zoom into the structure of your writing. So starting with your paragraph structure, one of the first things you can ask yourself is does each paragraph have a topic sentence? Now that question itself is kind of grade school paper writing, but the reason I put it in here is because the purpose of it is to ensure that each paragraph has a purpose in your writing. Your topic sentence is usually going to be located as the first sentence in your paragraph, or maybe right after the transition sentence, which we'll get into those in a second. But anyways, you just want to look at the beginning of your paragraph and make sure that there's a purpose for each one in your paper. The next thing you want to ask yourself about your paragraphs is, are there any that are either too long or too short? Because typically most of your paragraphs should be relatively similar in length. The way you check for this is simply looking at your document and identifying any paragraphs that are either abnormally long or abnormally short. If you can spot one, you'll want to investigate a little further by checking for things like run on sentences, unnecessary words or phrases. You want to check for fragments, you know, is this paragraph too short? Can I add more context here? Or is it too long? And should this one paragraph be broken down into two paragraphs? Once you start asking yourself these questions, this is when you're going to start looking at this sentence structure in your paper. By the way, if all of these editing tips sound like a lot, please know that a lot of these happen simultaneously. And the more you do them, the better you'll get at writing. So the less editing you'll have to do, but anyways, sentence structure. When you're here, you want to check for things like repetitive words, unnecessary words, or maybe the improper use of punctuations. Checking for unnecessary words is pretty important because it's a common thing that students tend to do. You know, you're trying to meet a page count or you're trying to sound smart, and it results in adding words that you don't need. Now, I don't have time to do a full lesson on this, but what I do have is this wonderful article that does that for you. It's fantastic because it goes through a list of unnecessary words and phrases and then shows you potential revisions along with examples. Now, moving on to repetitive words, which are different than necessary words, but they're equally important to check for. Simply put, you want to make sure that you're not using the same words and phrases over and over again in your paper. For example, for example is a common phrase that students use repetitively. So what I suggest doing is if you find yourself using a phrase or word over and over again, use it once or twice, and then you want to mix it up on the third go. If you're stuck on a different word or phrase that you should use instead, I highly recommend using a thesaurus to help you do this for you. My pro tip for you here is that if you want to become efficient in your writing, is that go ahead and use the thesaurus while you're writing. But still, it comes in handy while you're editing because sometimes when you're writing, you may not notice when you're overusing a word. So in the for example example, something else you can mix it up with would be maybe saying, for instance, or such as. Eventually, you'll naturally get a feel for this as you write. I do have to say that you should never use a thesaurus to try to sound smart. As a rule of thumb, if the word isn't something you would use in language speaking out loud, don't include it in your paper. The last thing you want to look for in your sentence structure is tone. Basically, you want to make sure you're consistent, but more so you want to make sure that you're using active and passive language correctly in third and first person language correctly. But for instance, you can use first person language to explain the steps you took in your research. However, you shouldn't use first person language to express an opinion. So what that means is that you wouldn't want to state that I feel that social media leads to lasting mental health issues in teens. Stating your personal opinion in first person language like that is not appropriate for academic writing. However, what would be appropriate is you could say, I surveyed 200 students from X high school and the results indicate that social media leads to lasting mental health issues in teens. That's okay because it's demonstrating the research that you did. But all right, friends, we have just a couple more questions to cover. And the next round is going to be all about transitions. So some things you want to ask yourself here are, are there appropriate transitions between my paragraphs and between my sentences? In transitions are simply words, phrases, or even full sentences sometimes that link your thoughts together. I like to call them thought links or thought bridges. So you start a new paragraph at the beginning of that paragraph. You want to make sure that you adequately link it to the previous paragraph. And then within the paragraph, you want to make sure that you're using words and phrases that link the different thoughts within the paragraph together as well. AKA you're bridging all your thoughts together in a cohesive manner. After editing and proofreading loads and loads of college papers, something I find that's really common if you don't have transitions down yet is that oftentimes a student would just jump straight into the topic of the paragraph. They would start with a fact or a figure, but they wouldn't introduce how it's relevant to what they were saying before. So for instance, let's say you're writing a paper about healthy diets for weight loss. Great. You write a few paragraphs about the different foods that are good for you when you're trying to lose weight. The next point you want to cover is water consumption. Now to start your water paragraph, let's say you start with a fact like you should drink eight glasses of water per day in order to main total health. Your reader would be lost. You need to explain that you're moving on from food and you're moving on to water. So you want to add in a thought bridge that bridges the food to the water before you add in that fact. So something you could say, for example, might be moving on from the top five foods that attribute to a healthy diet. Water plays a vital role in total health likewise, or something like that. But do you see how that's different than just stating a fact versus connecting the two different topics together? By the way, would any of you be interested in a full video tutorial on transitions? I find this was something that I used to help a lot of one-on-one coaching students with, but all right, the last thing you want to check for is your formatting. Now, technically you should have set up your formatting before you wrote your paper, but you always want to do one last look through to make sure that it's correct. The reason I say this is because every professor can take one look at a paper and tell if you formatted it correctly. And just like judging a book by its cover, when they look at your paper and they see that it's not formatted correctly, there's a good chance they're already going to start discounting the quality of your writing. It's just how it goes. Now, when it comes to formatting, you all know that my channel is dedicated to APA formatting. So I'm not going to cover each of these questions right now. Instead, I'm going to list them all out for you. And if you have any questions on any of these topics, you can find full video tutorials, explanations down in the description below. But basically when you're checking for formatting, the first question you want to ask yourself is, is my paper formatted correctly? In other words, are there page numbers in the right hand corner? Is my title page set up correctly? Am I using section headings appropriately and adequately? In other words, is my paper organized? When it comes to your referencing, have you used the appropriate amount of citations for this assignment? Not too many and not too little. And lastly, the places that you've paraphrased or either directly quoted a source, have you included in-text citations for those and the corresponding references in your reference list at the end of your paper? But all right guys, the more you edit your papers, the better you're going to get at writing them from the start and the less editing you'll eventually have to do. If you're still here right now, thank you so much for watching this video all the way through. I hope you found it useful. I say it time and time again, but thank you so much for your guys' support. I have to say this right now, I have a lot of you reaching out to me looking for one-on-one coaching and unfortunately I officially don't have time for one-on-one help anymore because I'm working on large projects that will help you guys as a whole. So again, thank you for your support. Don't forget to join the Smart Student Facebook group. Don't forget to give this video a thumbs up, comment down below, let me know what you liked about this video, let me know some random thought about you. I love to read all of your comments, but as always, go ahead and subscribe to this channel if you haven't already for more videos like this every week. Thank you.