What's the best self-editing checklist for an essay?

When I graded, the students whose revisions moved from C+ to B+ did the same thing: they added a counterargument paragraph, tightened their topic sentences, and cut filler. The students whose revisions didn't move the grade at all did something different: they fixed typos and rearranged some commas. Typos don't move grades — they annoy graders, but they don't change the substance. The things that move grades are structural: is the argument clear, is the evidence specific, does the essay engage the other side. Spending your editing time on those three things is always a better return than spending it on line-level polishing. If you only have 30 minutes to edit, here's the order: 10 minutes on the thesis and topic sentences (are they doing the work?), 10 minutes on adding missing evidence or counterarguments, and 10 minutes on deleting filler and reading aloud. Typos get whatever's left. That order will raise grades; the reverse order won't.

Here's an old copy editor trick: read your paper one sentence at a time, starting from the last sentence and going backwards. It feels strange and it's slow, but it catches more typos than any other technique, because your brain can't use the context of the previous sentence to auto-complete what the current sentence "should" say. You end up reading what's actually on the page. Do this on the last editing pass only — not for structure, not for paragraphs, just for typos and wrong words. It takes about half as long as a normal read-through and catches at least twice as many errors. Most professional editors do some version of this, and it's one of the few pieces of editing advice that almost nobody teaches and almost everybody who uses it swears by.