Improve your writing in three minutes

I find it comical that "utilize" is worse than "use" simply because "utilize" has become overused by people trying to impress.

Well, now I am down to 5 words of my 400 word essay :P

Other revision tips: Delete 10% of the words in your document, then add back only the essential ones. Print it in a bigger font size than you normally would, and read each sentence starting from the end of your document to check for confusing pronouns, grammar issues, and misspelled words. Make a list of the first word in every sentence, then change words that are used more than three times. Highlight verbs such as "to be," "to say," "to have," and others that you use frequently and change them if you can. :)

Remove the apostrophe in every "it's". In a document written in a formal tone, all the grammatically correct uses of "it's" are already expanded into "it is" or "it has". The remaining "it's" are therefore wrong and should be replaced by "its".