REVISING YOUR PAPER 1. RE-READING Take a break between writing your first draft and beginning revisions. This will allow you to step away from your work and clear your mind. Then ask yourself a few general questions about the paper: • Does it follow the original assignment? • Have you used relevant information from the class lectures in your paper? • Does your work make sense? • Does your work say something new? If you answer “no” to any of the previous questions, go back to your draft and work on its content. To begin editing at this point would be a waste of time. 2. GETTING IT STRAIGHT Unity • Is there any irrelevant information in your paper? Although you may be trying to make a word limit, you never want to ramble or repeat yourself. Organization • Are your paragraphs arranged to guide your reader to your point in a logical and precise manner? Paragraph #1 should logically lead to paragraph #2, and so on. • Do your topic sentences signal new ideas? • Do the sentences within each paragraph introduce, support, and explain the point of that particular paragraph? Sentence #1 should logically lead to sentence #2, and so on. Clarity
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Do you have a clear thesis or purpose that is defined within the paper? Make sure to tell your reader exactly what you want to discuss and what you are trying to prove. However, to do this YOU need to know exactly what you are trying to prove. Because writing is a process, you may not develop a strong thesis right away. In fact, sometimes your concluding paragraph contains the information that belongs in your introductory paragraph, including a more refined thesis. Do you use concrete evidence to support your thesis? If not, consider adding anecdotes, quotations, statistics, or other kinds of evidence in order to back up the main points of your paper. Have you made sure to delete any irrelevant points? Cutting and rewriting may be painful, but your paper will be much stronger. Have you created smooth transitions from each paragraph and sentence to the next? If not, use transitional words and phrases to connect your paragraphs so that your paper flows in a unified and understandable fashion.
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If you answer “no” to any of these questions, rethink the order and structure of your paragraphs and sentences. It may prove useful to outline your paper after it is written in order to determine if you’re proceeding logically from one point to the next. 3. SWEAT THE SMALL STUFF • Is your verb tense usage consistent? If not, circle all of the verbs in the paper and change them so that they are all either in past, present, or future tense. • Have you used the same words or phrases to open multiple sentences? If so, try to think of different ways that you could begin each sentence. This will make the paper more interesting to read and keep it from sounding stale and redundant. • Do you have too many “to be” verbs in your paper? You can fix this problem by again circling all of your verbs and replacing most of the “to be” verbs with action verbs. 4. THE HOME STRETCH • After making your revisions, take a break, and then read your work again. Try having someone else read your paper. The Writing Center staff is perfect for this task; they may catch things you have missed. While editing your final draft, be sure to ask yourself the following questions: • Are the quotations that you have used accurate? Are they introduced with a signal phrase and correctly documented? Make sure to check them against their original source and consult the appropriate reference book (MLA, APA, CBE, Chicago) for your citations. • Are there any words whose spelling or meaning is still questionable? If so, you must look them up in a dictionary and correct any errors. Spell check will not catch homonyms (their/there/they’re). • Is your punctuation correct? A good trick to try is reading the paper backwards—last sentence first, then the next-to-last sentence, and so on. By isolating the sentences, you are more likely to catch grammatical errors. • Do you have run-on sentences or sentence fragments? Try reading each sentence out loud. Your voice tends to rise at the beginning and fall at the end of a complete sentence. If your voice rises and falls more than once in a sentence, you may have a comma splice or a fused sentence. If your voice does not fall at the end of the sentence, you may have an incomplete sentence.
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