In Week 5, you focused on revision, re-thinking and re-seeing the ideas in your paper. This week, you will proofread and edit your Career Narrative Essay draft. All of your big decisions should be mad
Week 6 Final Draft Editing and Reflection Worksheet In this worksheet, you will make the final edits to your Career Narrative Essay and reflect on the process. |
In Week 5, you focused on revision, re-thinking and re-seeing the ideas in your paper. This week, you will proofread and edit your Career Narrative Essay draft. All of your big decisions should be made by now. It is time to get picky with your sentences, your word choice, and how your writing sounds.
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Analyze your use of “I” in the essay and make changes accordingly.
Instructions: This essay should be written in the first-person, using “I, me, my” to filter the career narrative through your perceptions. First-person is a great point of view to write in for reflection; however, there are some stylistic complications that you should address when you edit. Note: Open your draft of the Career Narrative Essay from Week 4. Complete the activities below:
Original sentences: Revised sentence: Notice the revised sentence references the same ideas in the original sentences but doesn’t repeat personal pronouns or the word “experience.” After you have analyzed your essay for overuse of pronouns and repeated words/phrases and made changes accordingly... Read through your essay again, reflect on how it has changed, and then answer the questions directly below.
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Edit your essay for tense and transition use.
Instructions: In this essay, you move the reader through time, focusing on your past, present, and future skills, goals, and accomplishments. When your essay shifts tenses, it needs to be clear for your reader. Not only do transitions and transitional phrases connect ideas in your essay, they can also move the reader through time to make your tense shifts more effective and clearer. Complete the activities below:
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Identify one specific change or idea that came from analyzing your essay for transition use, and reflect on how you can use this editing strategy in your future writing projects. |
Proofread for tone of voice.
Instructions: Tone of voice is the way your writing sounds in a reader’s head. It is affected by sentence structure, word choice, repetition, and the use of punctuation, among other factors. A consistent and compelling tone of voice will keep a reader engaged in your Career Narrative Essay. The voice you develop should establish you as a unique and marketable professional to a potential employer.
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Write at least one paragraph (5-7 sentences) reflecting on how the tone of voice in your essay has changed over the past weeks. Give at least one concrete example of a substantial change you made in this revision to achieve a more effective tone of voice. Be specific. Explain how your awareness of tone will affect your approach in future writing projects. |
Read your essay one last time.
Instructions: At this stage, you have spent so much time with your draft that it is hard to be objective. Oftentimes, our eyes see what we intend to write, not what we have actually written. Here are the final steps for finding any hidden, lingering errors that have escaped notice so far in the writing process:
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Write at least one paragraph (5-7 sentences) detailing the final changes you made to your essay. Were they big or small, and why did you notice them right at the end of the process? |
Once you have completed all your changes in your final essay and responded to all the questions and prompts above, select everything in this document, copy it, and paste it into the bottom of your final essay.
Click your cursor anywhere in the document.
Press CTRL and the A key together CTRL+A (Windows) on a MAC, use Command+A. The contents of the document should be highlighted.
Press CTRL+C (on a MAC Command+C) to copy all the highlighted material.
Go to your final essay document.
Scroll to the very bottom of your document. Click to place the cursor there.
Press CTRL+V (on a MAC Command+V) to paste in the contents of the worksheet.