English 6-1

Discussion: Implementing a Revision Strategy (GRADED)

We've come a long way, but there's still some work to be done! Revision is an important step of the writing process, so we're going to take some time to apply one of the revision strategies in the reading this week to your own persuasive draft.

Before you begin, please review the discussion rubric (click here) to make sure you fulfill all of the required tasks. You can also download/print the rubric by clicking here.

Let's look over the current draft of your paper in preparation for submitting your final draft next week. You can download another copy of your draft, if necessary, by returning to 5-6: Assignment 2, Milestone 1: Draft.

MY current draft FOR MY paper in preparation THAT I WILL BE submitting FOR MY final draft next week HAS BEEN UPLOADED. ALSO, THIS IS MY WIRTING FormaAPA Formatting Handbook Each task you turn in will need to be formatted in either APA or MLA format. This section will provide some information on citing your sources and provide practice for these skills. Formatting your references list and annotated bibliography in APA format Reference lists employ a hanging indent. This means that the first line of a Reference list entry starts at the left margin, but subsequent lines of that same entry are indented just as far as the first line of a paragraph would be (often a half inch). Word processors make hanging indents easy, so don't be tempted to format each line manually by using the return key and the tab button. In-text references: Patterns for in-text references The reference list is helpful on its own, but it is only the corresponding in­text references that really connect sources to the content of a paper itself. In­text references, known collectively as parenthetical documentation, are used within one's research paper to signify that the ideas and information presented have been taken from an outside source, either through paraphrase or quotation. APA has specific rules for mentions of a source in running text. After the first mention of a source in a research paper, APA format shortens the citation for some sources, depending on the number of authors. For sources with one or two authors, first and subsequent citations of sources are the same.

Then, take a look at your paper while asking yourself the following questions:

• First, looking over each section of the draft, in what area did you feel you did particularly well? What made it so strong, and how will you use these strengths in other sections of the draft that may need additional work?
• Second, select a single paragraph from your essay that you think needs the most work. Then, using one of the revision strategies outlined in the reading this week, revise the paragraph. Remember to go further than surface-level tweaks like grammar and mechanics—the paragraph should be thoroughly revised.

Finding Fresh Eyes

Sean Morey

So, when you're revising your pieces, it's often good to have somebody else look at this piece. And so, typically, you might do peer review in your class. However, using your classmates isn't always the best strategy for doing proofreading. Sometimes, you want somebody who's out of your class--who's unfamiliar with the material, unfamiliar with the assignments--to take a look at it so that they're completely out of the context in which you're writing. And so they can look at it and not have any preconceived idea about what the teacher is looking for, or what the actual prompt is, and it gives you a much different perspective about your writing than somebody who's in the class with you.

However, sometimes it's not always possible to find others. And so, ideally, you could put your essay away for a week or two and then come back to it when you've had a chance to forget about it in some ways. Now, obviously, with the constraints of a college course, that's not always possible, especially if you're scrambling in the last week just to get it done.

And so, there's a couple other tips that you can use in order to defamiliarize your writing so it's not as clear to you and it's not as kind of ingrained in your head. Often, when we read our own writing, we skip over stuff because we understand what it is--it's familiar to us, we wrote it after all. So some of the ways to get around this is to read the piece backwards. And so I don't mean this letter-for-letter read backwards, but you can start reading word-for-word backwards to look for spelling. And that way it's harder to just skip over words and miss spelling mistakes. Then you can read backwards sentence-by-sentence--so read the last sentence first, then read the second to last sentence first and backwards. And then you kind of aren't paying attention to the content, but really nitpicking the grammar and the mechanics and the style and those kinds of things.

And then finally, you can go paragraph-by-paragraph backwards. So you can look at each paragraph--how it makes sense as a whole and contained--but not necessarily within the context of the whole paper. And so, this allows you to kind of, in your head, jumble up your own writing so you're not as prone to kind of skip over mistakes that either you might miss or even mistakes that something like a word processor spell checker misses.

And so ideally get somebody else to look at it, but if you are the only person who has a chance to kind of proofread and edit and revise, those are some of the strategies you can use.