Make your prose more precise, economical, and jargon-free by knowing how and when to edit.
Editing is an important part of the writing process. Once your document is fairly well-developed, you need to edit. While your instructors may prize thoughtful argument, rich description, and thorough research, they are also likely to value careful editing.
Editing involves making "local" changes--that is, changes at the sentence and word level as opposed to "global" or large-scale changes, such as deleting the first three pages of a four-page document. Editors typically reread their texts word-by-word and sentence-by-sentence, while considering stylistic principles as well as grammatical, punctuation, and mechanical errors. When editing, writers trim down overblown phrases and replace inexact words, among other things.
While Writing Commons is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, derivative works of Writing Commons must include this note on all printed/displayed pages: "This is a derivative work of Writing Commons, http://writingcommons.org, a peer-reviewed, open-education resource. As a derivative, it may contain work that is not peer-reviewed or a part of Writing Commons."