Revision

Writing is an iterative process. Do not hope to write a perfect paper in one pass. Instead, work in several passes, focusing on progressively smaller aspects of your document in each pass. First, focus on selecting the right content for your paper and on structuring this content effectively from the document as a whole all the way down to individual paragraphs. Next, refine your writing at the sentence level to convey your ideas in a clear, accurate, and concise way. Finally, ensure that your document is correct: Check not only the grammar and spelling, but also the numbering of figures and tables, the validity of cross-references, the accuracy of dates, etc.

Beyond a good dictionary and a good grammar reference, you can use several types of software tools to check your document for correctness. Your text processor likely includes a spelling checker and perhaps a grammar checker. You can also build a personal list of attention points and look for these in your paper using simple or complex text searches. Finally, you can regard the Web as a corpus and search it — discerningly — for usage.

Automated spelling and grammar checkers do not understand what you write: They only check your text for symptoms of problems. Consequently, use them prudently. Closely examine the words or sentences they flag, but do not accept their proposed alternatives too readily. For example, if you wrote mouses instead of mice (the plural of mouse), a spelling checker may propose mousse and mouse's as alternatives (neither of which would be correct here), but not mice. You would then have to look up mouse in a dictionary to find the correct plural. Grammar checkers are typically even less accurate at proposing correct alternatives: Unless you know the language well, they may be more confusing than helpful.

To check the grammar and many more aspects of your text, a useful approach is to build your own personal list of attention points over time, then use your text processor's Find function to search for these points in your paper. For example, if you tend to focus on the observation of phenomena rather than the phenomena themselves — by using sentences such as "An increase of the temperature was observed" — you might add the word observe to your list. Then, each time you find observe in your text, you can decide whether to revise your sentence (for example, by writing "The temperature increased"). If your text processor allows you to search for patterns in addition to phrases, you can perform even more powerful checks. For example, you might search for the pattern "it is . . . that" to find suboptimal main clauses such as "It is clear that," "It is evident that," and "It is a surprise to us that" (best replaced by "Clearly," "Evidently," and "Surprisingly").

You can verify correct or idiomatic use of English via Web search. For example, if you wonder whether to write "we participated to a meeting" or "we participated in a meeting," you can search the Web for both phrases (with quotation marks) to see whether one is found significantly more often than the other (here, it would be the second one). This method is, of course, not authoritative — popular does not necessarily mean correct — but it can be helpful if used carefully. You may find a more representative sample by shortening the phrases you search for (in this example, perhaps by dropping the word we). If you do, be careful not to lose the relevance by shortening a phrase too much. For example, if you search for "participated to" only, your search will count irrelevant instances, such as "we participated to the best of our abilities." In any case, do not trust the counts alone: Look at the search results themselves to make sure they are relevant. Finally, include enough alternatives in your search. If you regard a meeting as a location rather than an activity, you may prefer to write "we participated at the meeting," an option you would, of course, not have found by searching for the initial two phrases.