Can you suggest a straightforward way of making my writing ighter – with better structure and line of argument?
Go through a print-out of your writing, putting in the margin what the topic of each paragraph is (just a 1-3 word summary). This may help you to find paragraphs that drift from topic to topic, or where you waffle. You will see repetition more clearly and be forced to organise your writing. You may then want to re-order the topics themselves so that the argument flows better. In the future it would be good to plan what topic each paragraph will have, but this is a good method for checking during editing. Once you have a clear topic per paragraph, take a look at this handout and attend to the structure within each paragraph .
