How To Edit Your Assignments: Best Practices

How To Edit Your Assignments: Best Practices
5 min read
31 December 2022

Student assignments are expected to be of a certain standard, like neatly presented, free of surface errors, and include a reference list. Careless mistakes can distract your professors from the ideas you are offering in your assignment and cost you marks. Most professors deduct marks if errors obscure the meaning or if there are writing errors. Hence, editing becomes an important part of writing assignments which acts like a quality check that eliminates any errors of logic or reasoning in your work and checks if your argument is logically structured. The top assignment writer service in the USA will always focus on editing the assignment before sending you the final work, as minor adjustments can make a great difference in your final grade. 

Editing For Structural Features

Essays, reports or literature reviews have specific stages that must be included in your assignment. If it is an essay, you need to make sure that it consists of an introductory section, while reports must include an abstract or executive summary before the introduction. Likewise, book reviews and reflective journals should contain your assessment of the value/ relevance of the particular book. 

Editing Grammatical Aspects And Punctuation

Grammatical or punctuation errors can result from carelessness, haste, lack of proofreading or even knowledge of the grammar of written English. This can happen especially when students discuss or explain new and difficult concepts as their language is put under considerable strain, which can result in clumsy expressions, incomplete sentences and faulty logic. Problems with sentences, noun-verb arguments and the use of apostrophes are some of the common grammatical problems with student writing. Hence, it is always better to seek guidance from the top assignment writer service in the USA that will help you identify the problem and provide the solution. If you are confident enough with your skills, you can still read your assignment aloud or ask someone to check your sentence structure and punctuation. 

  • Sentence Fragments: These are incomplete sentences that are punctuated like sentences but lack a vital component, which may be a finite verb or an independent clause. One way to correct the lack of a finite verb is by starting the sentence fragment another way. If your sentence lacks an independent clause, you can join the dependent clause to the independent clause in front of it or add a subject and finite verb to turn it into an independent clause. Or you can also replace the full stop with a colon as it introduces nouns or phrases expressed in a list form.
  • Noun-verb Agreement: Singular subjects require singular verbs and plural subjects require plural verbs. This is what noun-verb agreement refers to. But in student writing, these errors usually occur due to the subject being a complex nominal group. The student may be confused about which word in the group is the head noun and which are the post-modifying elements. This results in a lack of agreement between the subject and verb.
  • Use Of Apostrophes: We know that apostrophes are used with singular and plural nouns to show possession or in contractions, such as I'm for I am. However, the most common errors in apostrophe use are the confusion between singular and plural nouns and the inclusion of apostrophes in possessive pronouns and plural nouns when there is no possession. So what a student must remember is that if the possessive noun is singular, the apostrophe goes before the 's'; if the possessive noun is plural, it goes after the 's'; if the noun's spelling changes to form the plural, it goes before the 's'; and if the possessive word is a possessive pronoun, then no apostrophe is used.

Editing For Technical Aspects

Once your assignment is well-structured, and you have checked for all grammatical errors, now is the time to focus on your assignment's technical aspects, which can affect your work's overall appearance. The spell check program on your computer can easily help you with spelling errors. However, please don't just rely on the spell checker and refer to a dictionary, as it can help avoid embarrassing errors. 

The other technical aspects of an assignment include the cover sheet with your name, course, tutor's name and assignment title. Remember that professors like the assignments to be double-spaced and with a substantial margin, so there is plenty of space for noting down their comments. You also need to ensure that you keep your assignment within the word limit and add a reference list or bibliography with correct details of references, preferably in alphabetical order. This is the most important feature of an assignment. 

Wrapping Up

As mentioned before, editing your assignment includes three major areas; structural features, grammatical aspects, and technical features. However, you can customize this list by compiling your own one-page checklist from these three areas by incorporating features to which you need to pay special attention. Or you can also brief your professor's comments on your assignments as a special reminder of the things that need attention.

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Sharukh Khan 7
Joined: 1 year ago
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