Revising

Oddly enough, I love seeing my paper ripped to shreds with red pen markings of all the things I need to revise; as long as it does not have a grade on it of course!
Arguably, the process of blending I describe in my drafting post is a form of revising. My revising can consist of this blending, replacing words with better fitting ones, or simply formatting an essay to the proper style. Previously, during revising I would refer to a list of my common mistakes, and would use it as a guide when revising. Some of these included:

• NO: Past tense: had, was, ed, made in literature.
• NO: I, we, our, us, you.
• NO: Contractions.
• Never use: things, stuff, something.
• Check: theres, yours, effect/affect, women/an, then/than, except/accept.
• Court cases & book names are italicized.

Most of these are well ingrained in my mind by now, but when I did have to look for these, I would hit Command + f (Mac) or Ctrl + f (PC) to search for these potential errors.

Now, I'll simply do a read through for obvious mistakes or awkward sentences. After I read through, I listen to my essay on text-to-speech as I read along. This helps me correct multiple errors that I was previously blind to from reading my essay over and over. Once this is done, all my errors are corrected, and the essay is formatted, I'll print it out. Once and a while I'll find an error on the printed page, but its usually uncommon.