misspelled or duplicated

When you have written enough to satisfy the requirements of the assignment or you've said all you ought to say about a given topic, it is time to put your paper through the rewriting and college essay editing process. If you are one of those students who compose on a word processor, you're a step ahead of the game; if not, use the process of going from handwritten text to typewritten (word-processed) text as one of the steps of rewriting. As you go along, some spellcheckers will underline words or otherwise alert you with beeps and whistles that words are misspelled or duplicated and you can fix those on the fly. Otherwise, don't bother with spelling here; you can catch misspellings later. But do watch for clumsy phrases in your writing and gaps in your thinking.

Once your paper is in the word-processor, safely saved (on both hard drive and floppy disc), run the spellchecker. Some spellcheckers are better than others, but virtually all spellcheckers will allow some misused homophones to slip through. Depending on how much experience you've had as a writer, you probably know the words you have trouble with — affect/effect, their/there, its/it's, your/you're. There are dozens of such words, and you can review them in the Notorious Confusables section. You can do a search for words that give you special trouble and make sure you've used them correctly. Some spellcheckers will catch your typing of duplicate words, but most won't, so you'll have to look out for that, too. It's usually the the little words that slip by as duplicates, something that your fingers do when your brain slips into idle.