Better Writing Skills Checklist: Your Step-by-Step Guide

A checklist won't write your essay for you, but it will catch the mistakes you're too close to your own draft to notice. Run through this one before you submit anything.

Before You Draft: Prompt and Planning Check

• Have you reread the actual prompt and underlined the task verb — analyze, compare, argue, explain?
• Can you state your thesis in one sentence, and does it make a specific, arguable claim rather than a general observation?
• Do you have at least one piece of evidence in mind for every point in your outline, before you start writing full sentences?

Skipping this stage is the most common reason essays drift off-topic. A few minutes here saves far more time than it costs, because catching a weak thesis before you've written six paragraphs around it is far cheaper than discovering the problem at the revision stage, when fixing it means rewriting most of what you've already produced.

Structure Check: Does Your Essay Hold Together?

Related: Better High School Writing - Best Practices for Stronger Communication.

• Does every paragraph open with a topic sentence that connects clearly back to your thesis?
• Does each paragraph focus on a single idea, rather than mixing two points together?
• Do your transitions explain the logical relationship between paragraphs, rather than just signaling "next"?
• Does your conclusion add something — a broader implication, a final insight — rather than simply repeating your introduction word for word?

A fast way to run this check is to write out just your topic sentences, one after another, on a separate page. Read them in sequence without the rest of the paragraph attached. If that sequence of sentences doesn't tell a coherent story of your argument on its own, the structure needs work regardless of how polished the individual paragraphs feel.

Evidence Check: Is Your Argument Actually Supported?

• Is every claim followed by evidence, and is every piece of evidence followed by an explanation of what it proves?
• Have you avoided quotes or facts you included just because they sounded impressive, without being sure why they belong?
• If you're citing sources, are they formatted consistently and correctly according to what your teacher requires?

This is the step students most often shortcut under time pressure, and it's usually the one graders notice first — an argument that asserts without proving reads as weaker than it might actually be. If you find a paragraph where the evidence appears but the explanation is missing, that's usually a sign the paragraph needs one more sentence, not a full rewrite.

Sentence-Level Check: Clarity and Variety

See also: Better Writing Skills Requirements: What You Need to Know.

• Have you read the essay out loud at least once? Awkward phrasing usually announces itself the moment you say it.
• Are your sentences varied in length, or does everything run at roughly the same rhythm?
• Have you cut words that aren't doing work — "very," "really," "in order to," "the fact that"?
• Have you replaced vague verbs ("is," "shows," "has") with more precise ones where it strengthens the sentence?

Mechanics Check: The Final Pass

• Have you checked your personal list of recurring errors — the two or three mistakes you know you tend to make?
• Are your subjects and verbs in agreement throughout, especially in longer, more complex sentences?
• Have you checked for comma splices, particularly in sentences where you've joined two complete thoughts?
• Have you confirmed formatting requirements — spacing, headers, word count — match exactly what was assigned?

Save this pass for last, after content and structure. Fixing commas in a paragraph you later delete is wasted effort, which is exactly why mechanics belongs at the end of the checklist rather than the beginning, even though it's often the first thing students want to fix.

One Last Question Before You Submit

Read your own thesis statement, then read your conclusion. Do they still match? Essays evolve during drafting, and it's common for the argument that emerges by the final paragraph to be sharper — or slightly different — than the one promised at the start. If they've drifted apart, go back and adjust your introduction to match the essay you actually wrote, not the one you planned to write. This is a habit Better High School Writing emphasizes precisely because it's an easy fix that a surprising number of students never think to check.

A checklist like this takes five extra minutes and catches the errors that cost the most points relative to how little effort they take to fix. Keep this list somewhere you'll actually see it before you hit submit — a sticky note on your laptop works as well as anything more elaborate.

Over time, most students find they no longer need every item on this list written down, because the checks become automatic habits rather than conscious steps. When that happens, resist the urge to drop the checklist entirely — instead, shorten it to just the two or three items you personally still tend to forget, since everyone's remaining blind spots end up being slightly different. A checklist that's been personalized this way, based on your own actual mistakes rather than a generic list, tends to stay useful for far longer than one you never adjust. It's also worth revisiting the full list occasionally, even after you've trimmed it down, since new weaknesses tend to surface as assignments get harder and the old ones fade into the background, and a checklist that never grows with you eventually stops earning its place in your process.