Preflight Checks for College Essays, Courtesy of Twenty Years in Uniform

Ethan Johnson — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 01:43:58 GMT

The military taught me one lesson I use more than any other: never trust your memory with anything that matters. Preflight checks exist because competent, rested, experienced people forget things, and the cost of forgetting compounds at altitude.

Twenty years later I am a 47-year-old undergraduate, and I run my essays like preflights.

This started after I lost a full letter grade on a paper I had researched for three weeks. The content was strong. But I had botched the citation format, skipped the required section header, and submitted a file named "final_FINAL_v3.docx" against instructions that specified a naming convention. The professor's comment: "Great argument, sloppy execution." In my old line of work, sloppy execution had a body count. In college it merely bleeds your GPA, but it bleeds it for the same root cause: no procedure.

My procedure now lives in the essay checklist tool on Structora. It breaks a submission into phases, structure, evidence, citations, formatting, requirements, the pass most students skip where you reread the actual assignment prompt, and it saves your progress in the browser between sessions, so a paper I check on Tuesday remembers where I stopped. Before anything leaves my laptop, every box is green. No exceptions, including the night before Thanksgiving, ESPECIALLY the night before Thanksgiving, when errors breed.

Younger classmates find the ritual funny. The same classmates lose points every term to missing page numbers and phantom bibliography entries, errors that carry zero information about their intelligence and cost them anyway.