10 Steps to Earning Awesome Grades (While Studying Less)

Edit Ruthlessly
Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft contains a great quote:
“Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it 
breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill 
your darlings.”
Your awful first draft truly was awful. Sometimes, you’ll know this right away. 
Other times, you’ll have a hard time believing it because by golly, you were in 
the zone that time! Right? Right???
Here’s the truth: No matter how you feel about your first draft, editing can 
always improve it. Much of the writing you think is great will not illicit the same 
opinion from your readers.
That’s why Stephen King tells you to “kill your darlings” - the sentences, 

---

10 Steps to Earning Awesome Grades (While Studying Less)
74
paragraphs, and sometimes entire sections that sounded good at first, but that 
don’t pull their weight upon more careful inspection.
Now, editing isn’t only about cutting things out. Editing is simply the process of 
revising your paper to make it better. That means adding needed detail, 
restructuring and reordering your points, and fixing mistakes as well.
I see editing as a two-phase process. In the first phase, you need to answer the 
really important questions:
•
Does my paper have good narrative flow?
•
Do I have a clear main idea, and does that idea match up with the 
assignment?
•
Does each section back up the main idea in a meaningful way?
•
Is each section filled out with ample research?
•
What can be removed or stated in a simpler, better manner?
Essentially, this first phase is all about ensuring that your paper is effectively 
communicating your main idea in a way that will keep the reader interested and 
on-track.
At this point, the technical bits are not important. Don’t get hung up on spelling, 
grammar, sentence structure, or whether or not you’re supposed to indent 
paragraphs.
Instead, read through your draft and ensure that each argument you present 
backs up the main idea. If one isn’t essential - if it needlessly bloats the paper - 
cut it.
On the other hand, maybe you’ll find that you didn’t flesh out an essential 
argument well enough; in that case, go back and add the needed points from 
your research. Also, think about the order of your arguments as well; think 
about how their placement affects the flow of the paper.
Side note: Since 95% of my writing over the past several years has been for blog 
posts and other independent projects, I almost forgot about this… but I suppose 
it’s likely that you’ll have several writing assignments that have an arbitrary 
length requirement. (Bleh)
If that’s the case, I’d recommend keeping the sections you cut during the editing 
process in a backup document. Try to hit the length requirement with your 
essential arguments as best as you can, but if it doesn’t work, adding one of 
those lesser arguments might be justifiable. It’s probably a better idea than 
padding your other arguments with excessive wordiness.
Once you’re happy with the narrative structure of your paper, it’s time to move 

---

10 Steps to Earning Awesome Grades (While Studying Less)
75
on to the second phase of editing: technical edits.
At this stage, you’re looking through your paper for things like:
•
Spelling and grammar mistakes
•
Badly structured sentences
•
Sentences or paragraphs that don’t sound right
•
Formatting errors
Here are a couple of useful tips for making the process of technical editing go 
more smoothly.
First, print out your paper. I find that proofreading my writing in its final 
intended medium helps me pay closer attention to the details. 
For example, each week I send an email newsletter to my readers that updates 
them on that week’s new video and podcast episode. Before sending it, I always 
email myself a test version and proofread it right in my inbox; often, I catch 
mistakes I didn’t see when going over it in MailChimp’s editor. My inbox 
represents the final medium for the newsletter, and a physical sheet of paper 
does the same for your writing assignment.
Also, you get an additional benefit by proofreading on paper: you can only mark