Essay Masterclass / Module Nine
Start with the principle, because it changes how you look for mistakes. Mina Shaughnessy's finding, from reading thousands of student papers, was that error is systematic rather than careless. A student making the same construction repeatedly is following a rule, and the useful question is what the rule is.1
Which means proofreading by rereading and hoping is the wrong method. You are looking for your pattern, and you probably have two or three that account for most of your errors.
Here are the ten that actually appear in application essays, in rough frequency order.2
The comma splice. Two complete sentences joined by a comma. I loved the house, my mother cleaned it. Fix with a full stop, a semicolon, or a conjunction. This one is far ahead of everything else.
The dangling modifier. An opening participle attached to the wrong subject. Walking into the room, the smell hit me. The smell was not walking. This is epidemic in this genre for one specific reason: everybody opens with a participial phrase, so everybody is exposed to it.
Its and it's. The apostrophe means it is. Always. There are no exceptions and a spellchecker will not catch either direction.
Tense drift. Starting in the past and sliding into the present mid-paragraph, usually at the point where the writing got involving.
Subject and verb across a long phrase. The collection of letters my grandmother kept in the drawer were faded. The collection was faded. The intervening plural pulls the verb.
Apostrophes in plurals. The 1990's, three sister's. No apostrophe for a plain plural.
Then and than. Comparison takes than. Sequence takes then.
Vague this. A sentence beginning This meant or This showed where this refers to the previous paragraph rather than to a noun. Add the noun: this refusal, this argument.
Missing comma after an introductory element. After that summer I stopped asking. American convention puts a comma after anything longer than a short phrase.
The real word that is the wrong word. Form for from, lose for loose, affect for effect, complement for compliment, lead for led. A spellchecker approves every one of these, which is exactly why they survive to submission.
Do not check all ten in one pass. Find your two, from this list, by looking at the errors somebody has already marked in your drafts, and then run one pass per error across the whole file. It is faster and it catches more.
Thirty minutes, and it catches more than any checklist.
Read every piece aloud, alone, out loud rather than in your head, and mark only what makes you stumble. Do not fix anything while reading. Marking is the whole activity.
The reason this works better than silent proofreading is that your eye supplies what should be there and your mouth does not. A missing word is invisible when read silently and impossible to miss when spoken. So is a sentence with two clauses fighting, and so is a rhythm that flattens.
Zinsser mentions that his own manuscript pages, already rewritten four or five times, still gave up clutter when he read them aloud.3 If that is true of him it is true of you at draft four.
Three things a read-aloud finds that nothing else does.
Words you cannot say. If you stumble over a word in your own sentence, it is not your word. This is the last check on Module Five's thesaurus list and it is the most reliable one.
Sentences that run out of breath. If you need a second breath mid-sentence, the reader needs a full stop.
Accidental repetition. The same word three times in two sentences, which the eye skates over and the ear cannot.
Do this for every piece, including the hundred-and-fifty-character activity descriptions. They are short enough that it costs four minutes and they are read by every school.
Mechanical, unglamorous, and the site of every avoidable disaster at this stage.4
Counts differ between your document and the form. Always. Your word processor and the portal count differently, and the portal is the one that matters. Paste everything in and check there.
Formatting breaks on paste. Italics vanish. Paragraph breaks collapse or double. Curly quotation marks turn into symbols. Em dashes become question marks. Paste, then look at what arrived rather than assuming.
Read the preview as a document. Generate the preview and read the whole thing as a reader would see it. This is where you discover that your careful paragraph breaks are gone and the essay is now one block.
Time zones. Deadlines are usually in the school's local time and occasionally in a different one. If you are in India, a deadline of eleven fifty-nine on the thirty-first is the morning of the first for you, and getting that backwards has ended applications. This is one of the strongest arguments for submitting three days early.
Separate applications. Honors colleges, scholarships, some majors, some arts supplements. Every one has its own form and frequently its own earlier deadline. Check that the list you made in Module Zero is complete.
Aid forms. Frequently the same day as the application, and missed far more often, because the writing has absorbed all the attention.
Recommenders submitted, not invited. Two different states in the portal. Check the actual status.
Confirmations saved. After each submission, save the confirmation. A screenshot and the email, in the school's folder. This costs one minute and it is the only evidence you will have if something is disputed later.
One more pass over everything, looking for the machine voice, and it matters more now than in Module Four for a specific reason.
Module Four's mark-up happened when you had one essay and plenty of time. At this point you have thirty pieces and no time, which is exactly the condition under which anybody reaches for help. So the pieces most likely to carry the machine register are the ones written in the last ten days, and those are the ones you have read least.5
Re-run the tells across the whole file, quickly. The balanced list of three. Not just X but Y. Hedged universals. Even sentence length. Any sentence that exists to sound finished. Any paragraph with no physical object in it.
Then the deeper test, once, on the file as a whole. Where does this file cost me anything? Find the sentences where you admit, concede or look bad. If your personal statement has one and none of your thirty supplements does, that is the finding, and the repair is one sentence in two or three of them.
Pay particular attention to the answers you wrote last. Read the final three things you drafted, in the order you wrote them, and see whether the voice thins out. It usually does, and it is fixable in twenty minutes now and not at all after you submit.
The last thing, and it has no book behind it.6
You will not feel finished. That feeling does not arrive, and waiting for it is how people submit at eleven fifty-eight.
So replace the feeling with a condition. It is finished when the changes you are making are lateral.
A lateral change is one where the new version is not better, only different. Swapping one adjective for a synonym. Reordering two sentences that worked either way. Reinstating something you cut the day before. When three consecutive edits are lateral, you are done, and continuing past that point makes essays worse rather than better. Most of us have watched a good essay get sanded flat in its last two days.
Two other stopping conditions worth knowing.
You are editing to relieve anxiety rather than to fix a problem. The test is whether you can name the problem before you open the file. If you cannot, you are not editing, and the file should stay closed.
Somebody else cannot find a problem you agree with. Not somebody who says it is fine. Somebody who tries and fails.
Then submit, and understand what you are handing over. It is not a perfect document, and no admitted essay in this bank is a perfect document. Several of them have flat openings and one ends on a platitude. They got in because the file, as a whole, made a specific claim about a specific person, which is the thing you have spent this whole course building.
The part after this you do not control. You control whether the thing you sent was yours, whether it said something only you could say, and whether it arrived three days early. All three of those are now true.
Done when four separate single-error passes have been run over every piece.
Done when every piece has been read aloud once and every mark addressed.
Done when the preview has been read as a document and every deadline, form and recommender is confirmed.
Done when the file's last-written pieces sound like its first-written ones, and more than one piece costs you something.
Done when it is submitted, three days early, and every confirmation is saved.
If you keep one sentence: run one pass per problem rather than one pass for everything, and submit three days early, because the thing that goes wrong is never the thing you were worried about.