1. Refusal to remove any part of your work.  This one’s common, especially for unseasoned writers who have worked laboriously on a piece.  Upon closer inspection, it may be in your best interest to cut out certain paragraphs and eliminate a few parts, but the pain of having to strip something you’ve worked so hard to do just makes it overly difficult.
2. Falling in love with your writing.  One writer I met gave me this advice: find your favorite passage in every draft you write and remove it.  While I still do feel that’s taking it too far, the message is clear – if you fall in love with your writing, you cannot objectively examine it.  In this case, setting the work aside for some period of time (like a day or so) should help.  Of course, the part about throwing away your favorite passage can work too.
3. Too much rewriting necessary.  This usually happens when you review your work and end up with serious doubts about your primary points.  You have several choices in this situation: you can pray the reader doesn’t notice, change your work completely to reflect your new viewpoint or simply acknowledge the contradiction.  The first one can lead to disaster; the second will probably take too long than you have time for; the third lets you keep your work intact, although you’ll need to provide a reason why it still holds up, despite the existence of issues.

Every writer worth the eye bags from his all-nighters has been there, so don’t worry.   Sometimes, no matter how hard you try, all that hard work manages to produce nothing but a dud.   It’s part of life.

When you chance upon such an unfortunate predicament, there are two general ways to go: start from the beginning or rescue what you can.  Obviously, if you’re pressed for time, the latter is your only likely option.

Evaluate your writing organization. Did you present things in a timeline, order of importance or some other form of organization?  How would it look if you rearranged the presentation using a  different approach?  It could drastically change everything.

Evaluate your arguments. Do your supporting arguments hold enough water to successfully carry the piece?   Are you hanging your central ideas on weak mounts?  Return to your outline and see how you can improve it.  A new paragraph that ties everything better may be all you need.

Evaluate your main point. Is it clear enough for the reader?  More importantly, is it clear enough to you?  Try detaching yourself from the work and put yourself in your reader’s shoes.  Will you get the point based on what’s written alone?  If not, you may want to either simplify it or expound on your reasoning further.

Evaluate your overall impact. Do your strongest materials appear up top?  Most people will read the beginning of your piece and decide whether to proceed.  If your best paragraph is nowhere near the top, there’s a good chance they’ll never get to it.  Similarly, look to end strong, as it will help leave a more lasting impression.

How do you make your process faster?  Draft the entire piece, ignoring the desire to edit in real time.  Only revise and edit once you’ve finished with your first pass on the whole thing.  Finish before you correct; get it done before getting it right.

Apart from the speed, revising the complete piece brings another benefit.  You revise the work as a whole, rather than as individual parts.  That way, you already have a unified vision in mind before you even begin making changes.

Since you’re looking to edit efficiently, you may as well do the whole process right.  Start editing for structure, trying to determine if your ideas flow in a manner that allows the reader the best chance to digest them.  After that work on your transitions, carefully crafting how well each new topic segues into the other.  Only after that should you even consider using a grammar checking software and working at each individual sentence.

Laziness

There’s only for possible reason to refuse to revise your copy and that’s utter laziness.  As busy as your schedule might be and as pressed for time as you are, there are always opportunities to revise.

A grammar software will take no more than a few minutes to run, even for long essays that span ten thousand words.  Will it really take more than thirty minutes to read through your 2,000-word article and clear up confusing parts?

Benefits Of Revising Your Copy

Revising ensures that your presentation is sound. How do you know that what you’ve written stands up to what you’ve originally intended for the material?  Reading through your text with an open mind is the only way to ensure it.

Revising makes sure you will be understood. Grammar errors and poor sentence structures not only make you look amateurish, they turn your copy into a difficult-to-understand mess.  The most well-meaning ideas will fail when expressed in an unclear manner – a serious problem that a good grammar software can easily fix.