Revising Essays To Emphasize Key Ideas

Open up the hood to your essays and look at the language engine. How strong are your main ideas, how much coordination and subordination and paralleling and ordering have you taken to your main points? No matter. Even if you have spent a lot of time on those ideas, you can spend a bit more time going through your essays and looking for places to reorder and rewrite sentences to make sure your ideas are EMPHASIZED.

1. Do one of two strategies for your already revised essays:

• Bold all of your most important sentences, the thesis claim and topic sentences. 

• OR, sketch outline those same sentences on a clean sheet of paper, with space in between each sentence so that you can work on writing the sentence over using different techniques.

2. Look at concision once again, after revising the sentences. Again, the biggest thing that different strategies do is making us continuously inspect our language and try to better what we've already written--in content and in grammar.