Five Tips to Improve Your Essay on the Fly

Assignments can be stressful, especially if you leave them to the last minute (like I did almost the entire way through high school...). There are very few people that can pull off a truly impressive paper 8 hours before it's due. If you're one of them, I'm happy for you, but for us mortals, working out a brilliant masterpiece at 2 a.m. is unlikely.

Now, there is no substitute for content. If your content is lacking, you have a serious problem, but essays are as much about the presentation of content as the content itself. So, while the odds are that your content won't be as strong if you write at the last minute, you can bring your mark up a bit by writing well. But the bottom line remains that it's better to start early and leave yourself plenty of time.

However, life does get in the way sometimes, so here are five tips to spruce up your essay on short notice.

1. Try to avoid repeating words as much as possible. Now, obviously I'm not talking about words like "a", "to" and "the". I'm talking about adjectives like "clearly", but especially verbs like "said", "demonstrate", "show" and "reveal". There are over one million words in the English language. The good news is, you don't have to know them all, because we have thesauruses. In Microsoft Word, if you highlight the word you want a synonym for and press Shift + F7, it will put the word into a thesaurus for you and bring up a list of other options for that word.
2. HOWEVER, before you replace your word with a synonym, make sure you know exaclty what it means. That is why we also have dictionaries. If possible, see if you can find the word used in the context of a sentence. Online dictionaries are good for that. I reccomend http://oxforddictionaries.com/
3. Check carefully to make sure that your tenses are consistent.  What does that mean? That means making sure that you don't end up saying "was" and "went" in a present-tense essay. It's a common mistake that can cost you big time, especially in English. The rule for English essays is that you write them in present tense because they are considered on-going (i.e. "Robinson Crusoe demonstrates both his resourcefulness and determination when he builds the canoe" rather than "Robinson Crusoe demonstrated his resourcefulness and determination when he built the canoe".) For History, past tense is obviously the standard, and past tense is generally also acceptabled for most other subjects.
4. Try to cut down on words. Quite often you'll find that shaving off a few words in a sentence will make your meaning clearer. This is especially important in quotations. Block quotes are okay, but it's generally better to keep it short (i.e. under four lines).
5. Make sure that your analyses directly relate to both your thesis and the argument of the paragraph it's in. Analysis, like everything else in writing, is about quality rather than quantity. It's better to come in under the word count than to put in a bunch of filler. Plus, you generally have a 10% margin with word limits, meaning that you can either be 10% over or 10% under and still be safe.

While I can't promise that these tips will make your essay A-worthy, I guarantee they'll help to improve it.