Edit

Editing is the final step of the writing process. Check your grammar, your punctuation and spelling, make sure you kept any promises you made throughout your paper, make sure references are cited in MLA format, etc.

Failure to edit carefully (which may include a trip to the Writing Center or collecting a favor from a friend to proof read it) can destroy your ethos. You will either seem uneducated, sloppy and careless, or rushed.

Sometimes careless writing can actually reverse the meaning of a sentence or cause ambiguity and confusion. Even the absence of a comma can do this. Wanna hear some entertaining examples of such mistakes?

Grammatical and other writing rules exist to make communications clear. Here are a few of the commonly-abused ones for reference:

Commas:

Comma usage is somewhat flexible, which is one reason that so many students have trouble or lack confidence in using them. Here are a few things to avoid:

• Never use a single comma between the subject and the verb, even if you want a little pause there. The pause will happen naturally. (Bad example: People with big smiles and who like to laugh, are always welcome with my friends.)
• Use a pair of commas around phrases if they will make the sentence easier to read (When I first moved to the peninsula, fourteen years ago, I instantly fell in love with the neighborhood.)
• Use commas when beginning a sentence with a prepositional phrase (anything that tells "place" or "time"—for which we use place words in English) (At four in the morning, you’d expect her to be grouchier. Under the dock, I found a silver dollar.)
• Use commas in lists. You must have at least three items for a list. If you only have two, the word "and" or "or" or whatever does the job by itself. (Bad example: I bought six donuts, and a soda.)

Semicolons:

Semicolons are hierarchical, which means they’re a step up from commas. You can’t use semicolons unless

• You’re joining two complete sentences (each has a subject and verb)
• At least one of those sentences already has a comma.

(I knew my brother was my best friend; but once Laura came along, I hardly ever saw him.)

This explains why the word "however" usually gets a semicolon

(I had paid my dues long ago; however, when the sheriff caught up to me, he still made me serve time.)

but the word "but" often doesn’t

(I had paid my dues long ago, but when the sheriff caught up to me, he still made me serve time.)

"But" is a small enough word that it doesn’t really deserve a comma after it. That’s how flexible comma rules are.

Hyphens and Dashes:

Hyphenate when you have two adjectives that go together before a word, that are not equal. "A big, brown boat", for example, gets a comma and not a hyphen because "big" and "brown" are pretty much equal. Although it sounds better in that order, you could theoretically write "A brown, big boat." "A dark-brown boat", on the other hand, gets a hyphen, because dark describes brown. So maybe that’s how I should say it—hyphenate an adverb and an adjective, but not two adjectives.

When you want to make a little break in a sentence—like this one—use double dashes. Two of them. If you open the break with dashes, close them that way, too. Don’t mix them up, opening with dashes and closing with commas or parentheses, which are just other styles of making such asides.

Spelling:

I’m not even gonna try to list all the words you could misspell, but I’ll mention a few I see too often and hope to not see any more of. I’m serious—after grading for a long time, whenever I read these words I usually find myself double-taking to see if they’re spelled right even when they are.

Two: a number

To: various uses. Preposition, etc. Anything but the other two uses listed above and below.

Too: describes an extreme. Too much.

They’re: they are. Shouldn’t be hard to remember.

There: the place that’s not next to you. See? Looks like "here" with a t on it.

Their: possessive. Looks a little like "her".

Woman: singular.

Women: plural. I actually started to wonder if "woman" was missing on some program’s spell checker one semester.

Then: time, sequence.

Than: comparison. These two words sound the same in the Utah County dialect.