Read your essay aloud. According to Harvard University's Writing Center, reading your essay aloud helps you to determine how well your sentences flow. If something sounds awkward, revise it. As Capital Community College explains, "Your ears will catch clumsy phrasing and botched sentences before your eyes will."
Eliminate unnecessary words. Verbose sentences can distract your reader from the important information in your college essay. Specifically, look for adjectival phrases that are repetitive, like "the content and happy woman." Harvard's Writing Center suggests making sure that every word in every sentence is useful to the content of your essay. If a word or phrase does not have a clear purpose, remove it.
Review the structure of the essay. If you wrote an outline, refer to it as you review your essay's structure. Make sure you followed the outline and crafted a logical, perhaps chronological, structure for your essay. If a paragraph appears out of place, then restructure it. Move it to a logical place in the paper, and ensure there are proper transitions between sections to make for reader flow.
Check your references. Proper attribution is imperative in college essays; your professors want to see how you conducted your research and where your information came from. Check your in-text citations against your list of references and make sure you have properly attributed information that came from other sources.
Check for proper style. Depending on your field of study, your professor will likely expect you to adhere to Modern Language Association (MLA) or American Psychological Association (APA) style. Make sure your list of references follows your style guide as well as your in-text citations. Check that the title page and headers and footers also adhere to style guidelines.
Conduct a line-by-line copy edit of the essay. Here, you are looking for misspellings or typos, misplaced punctuation and basic grammatical errors. Turn passive sentences into active, "subject-verb-object" constructions.