About writing
Writing (in particular, at university) can be seen as a process: you write a first draft, and then you edit it until you have a finished text that fulfills the requirements of a given assignment or task.
The particular requirements on your finished text may vary. In some courses, you need to stick to a template; in other courses, you may be more free to choose the structure of your text. However, any text you produce must always obey the principles of an academic text, which includes this basic structure.
How you edit your text is a matter of personal preference -- it really does not matter how you do it, as long as your final version is an academic text according to our definitions. While editing, it is not entirely trivial to discover problems with your text, nor is it trivial to know how to fix them. Here are some suggestions for how to discover and fix problems.
Peer review
A common way to discover problems in text is to do peer review. This basically means that you give your text to one of your peers (a friend, a classmate, ...) and ask them to read the text and comment on it. In this setting, the reader has a responsibility to provide constructive and specific comments on the text. Constructive and specific feedback allows the author(s) to revise and improve their work without having to ask too many follow-up questions to the reader.
Less constructive feedback:
"The first paragraph on page 4 was a bit hard to process."
How? There is no explanation.
"You should be clearer about what your own contribution is (p. 5)."
Where, specifically, are things unclear? What triggered the reader's comment (a particular paragraph, claim, etc.)?
"Do you really mean that a = b?"
What is the problem? Is a = b infeasible? Is the statement unclear? Spelling errors? etc.
More constructive feedback:
"I think you're trying to explain the X algorithm on page 4, but I don't follow your reasoning from line 3 onward / when you start describing Y..."
The author needs to clarify whether they are indeed describing the X algorithm, and perhaps ask follow-up questions to find out what, specifically, the reader is confused about after line 2.
"You first describe how your implementation works, but then you keep referring to what I believe is a standard Python module. Which part(s) are your own work, and which part(s) are you reusing?"
"If I understand Equation 10 correctly, it does not automatically follow that a = b (for example, consider when ...). Could you clarify?"
The reader here explains where things become unclear, giving a counterexample that illustrates a case when a = b does not hold.
Read more in detail about how to read and comment on other students' texts
Directed peer review
Sometimes you do not need someone to review your entire text, or you have a feeling that a particular passage, or paragraph, does not quite 'flow' or 'work' properly. In these cases, it may be a good idea to ask someone else to read your text (or parts of it) while giving them clear instructions on what types of problems you would like them to identify. (If your instructions are not clear, you might get feedback such as, 'Um, sure, it looks great!' which is not very helpful.)
In what we call 'directed' peer review, it is not only the reader who is responsible for constructive feedback, but also the author -- they must give clear reading instructions. Thus: Ask your reader(s) specific questions, and make sure that their answers by definition will be informative. Questions about someone's subjective opinion are not always bad, but you have to know how to use the answers.
Questions that might not help you
- Do you understand this paragraph?
- Do you think I managed to explain X sufficiently well?
- Does this table look good?
All the above questions may be answered yes/no, and the answer(s) may also be particular to that reader -- other readers might think the paragraph easier to understand, and yet others might find X completely incomprehensible.
Better questions
- What do you think I want to convey in this paragraph?
- Could you tell me how I have calculated X based only on the information on page 4?
- What is your overall impression of this table, i.e., what information does it give you?
The reader's answers will indicate to you whether they have missed particular important aspects, and whether you have managed to convey the main point(s) of your argument(s) clearly enough. If the reader's answers are unclear, vague, or difficult to understand, this is often an indication that what you have written is unclear, vague, or difficult to understand. Ask them to specify where they got lost while reading.