ENG 121 wk4 Discussion 1

As you prepare to write your first discussion for this week, take a few moments to do the following: •Read Chapter 9 of Essentials of College Writing. •Review the Grading Rubric for this discussion.    head with Qmarks Reflect: Take time to reflect on writing as a process—how ideas develop through the use of language, and the changing of that language. Reflect on the differences between revising and editing as described in the textbook.>      writting hand Write: In your initial post for this discussion •Discuss the key differences between revising and editing. •Provide an example of what a writer does when revising, and what a writer does when editing. •Explain how much time you believe a writer should spend on each task and why. •Include a question you have about the content of the assigned reading for the week.  Your initial post must be 200 to 300 words in length and posted by Day 3. Support your claims with examples from the required material(s) and/or other scholarly sources, and properly cite any references as outlined in the Ashford Writing Center (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site..

Please include question about this week reading…

My first draft usually has only a few elements worth keeping.

I have to find what those are and build from them and throw out what
doesn’t work, or what simply is not alive.

—Susan Sontag

Learning Objectives

After reading this chapter, you
should be able to:

1. Practice revising your paper.

2. Examine your paper for focus, organi-
zation, and completion.

3. Distinguish between revision and
editing.

4. Understand language choice concepts
such as tone, genre, denotation/
connotation, and synonyms.

5. Utilize editing strategies to check for
clarity and conciseness, as well as
proofreading and format-checking
strategies.

9Revising, Editing, and Proofreading

Hans Hansen/Lifesize/Thinkstock

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CHAPTER 9Section

9.1 The First Draft

Writing is more akin to running a marathon than a sprint: Pacing yourself for a longer run
that has a varying terrain is the best mental approach to writing. In writing an essay, your
terrain consists not only of the prewriting process discussed in Chapter 4 but also the revis-
ing, editing, and proofreading stages. When a writer tries to sprint through one or more
of these stages rather than taking the leisurely marathon route, the final writing product
suffers. Depending on the length of the assignment and the amount of time given to com-
plete it, revising, editing, and proofreading should occur over the course of many days, if
not weeks. Like marathon running, writing requires conditioning and patience: The more
a writer conditions and paces herself, the easier it is to produce a successful final draft.

9.1 The First Draft

Always assume that you will need to spend a lot of time revising your papers. Plan to set aside the required time and avoid procrastination. All of the prewriting materials you have composed, such as an outline or a mind map, will assist you in
generating the first draft of your paper. Reread those drafting materials several times to
gain a sense of how to respond to a particular writing prompt and how to best organize
your ideas. Look for the tentative thesis, the synthesis of ideas you wrote out while brain-
storming. Refer to the tentative outline to structure the order of main points and evidence
that might be used. Note main ideas and concepts that you arrived at while brainstorming.

Getting Content Down on Paper
On writing a first draft, Irish author Frank O’Connor states, “I write any sort of rubbish
which will cover the main outlines of the story, then I can begin to see it (Winokur, 1990,
p. 243). Joyce Cary, another Irish writer, shares his method of drafting this way: “I may
start anywhere, in the middle or at the end. I may go from the end to the beginning in the
same day, and then from the beginning to the middle” (Winokur, 1990, p. 244).

When you are creating the first draft, keep writing until you have said everything you
want to say about a certain point. Then move on to another point and write down every-
thing you want to say about that point. Try not to stop writing to correct mistakes, check
a word, find a different word, or otherwise edit your work. In his best selling book, Way
of the Peaceful Warrior, author Dan Millman writes, “There is a saying: ‘When you sit, sit;
when you stand, stand; whatever you do, don’t wobble’ . . .” (Millman, 1984, p. 133). This
saying can be adapted to writing: “When you write, write; when you edit, edit; whatever
you do, do not wobble.” Just keep writing.

If you get stuck while you are drafting and are not sure what to say, you have several
options:

• Skip over the difficult part, leave a blank space, and keep going.
• Write anything, no matter how silly it sounds.
• Jot down new ideas you may want to pursue in another paragraph.

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CHAPTER 9Section 9.1 The First Draft

It can be helpful to set writing time goals for yourself—for instance, you could decide that
each time you sit down, you will write for one hour straight without interruptions of any
kind. You will be amazed at how much you write if you do a little of this each day. The key
is to keep writing.

Writers should reflect on what they
have written at the end of each writ-
ing session. This is often done away
from the computer and even while
working on something else. Ideas
require time to develop, process, and
refine, and many people find that
their best ideas often come at random
moments. Give yourself space from
your actual writing after you have
met your writing goal for the day.

The length of the break is ultimately
up to you, but one night is a good
rule of thumb—it allows enough
space from your writing and yet not
so much that you lose your momen-
tum. This age-old wisdom is good
advice for a first draft of your paper, too. If you complete your first draft in the evening,
go to sleep, and then look at it the next day, you may discover that sections causing you
difficulty the day before fall more easily into place when you are rested. If you complete a
section of your paper or a complete draft in the morning, perhaps you will feel refreshed
enough to look at what you have written in the evening: Only you will know when you
are ready. Whatever the length of your break, make sure you give yourself a specific time
to begin work again—and define the time you will return to your writing before you step
away from your draft—so that you do not delay your progress on the assignment. Try to
avoid waiting more than two days to return to your writing because that would likely
interrupt the development of your ideas—you can get too far away from your writing.
Make sure that you write down a tentative thesis statement as part of the first draft pro-
cess; you will return to this thesis and revise it after allowing yourself some time to pro-
cess what you have written. When you return to the draft, you will be looking at it with
“fresh eyes,” and you will probably find that revising is much easier than it would have
been if you tried to revise the draft immediately. Begin by rereading what you wrote the
day before and making adjustments/revisions as necessary. Then pick up where you left
off at the end of the draft, keeping in mind the day’s writing goal.

Planning for Revision and the Thesis Statement
After writing your first draft and taking a break, it is time to concentrate on the next step
in the writing process: revising your draft. It is sometimes difficult to know when to stop
writing and begin revising. Try to write until you have developed your ideas as fully
as possible. Often, it is the case that in writing a draft, ideas that you may think are not
your main point could become the focus of a new paragraph. Because ideas and critical
thinking emerge while you are writing, a first draft should explore your connections as
thoroughly as possible.

Fuse/Thinkstock
It is always advisable to “sleep on it” after writing your first
draft in order to revisit it the next day with “fresh eyes.”

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CHAPTER 9Section

9.2 Revising

When you return to your draft later, reread the paper and ask yourself what main points
you are arriving at. Keep in mind that you want to sort out which points best respond
to the writing prompt. You may want to write down a tentative introduction and thesis
statement and then draft your body paragraphs, but keep in mind that if you do this, your
thesis statement is not a permanent contract. The trouble with writing a thesis statement
first is that you are guessing what you are going to argue in your body paragraphs before
you have written them. What you end up arguing needs to then be reflected in your thesis.
Return to your thesis statement multiple times and revise it to make sure it reflects what
you argue in your body paragraphs and that it directly responds to the writing prompt. A
more natural way to arrive at your thesis statement is to write your body paragraphs first
in an effort to discover your argument and develop your ideas. You would then reread
your paragraphs several times and try to determine what main point you are working
toward. Then go back and write your introductory paragraph and thesis. No matter which
method you decide to use, all writing should be revised and refined until you have put
forward your best, most specific, response to the writing prompt. You never should feel
that what you have written on the page is something you cannot change.

9.2 Revising

R
evision is the process of rereading, reflecting upon, and improving drafts or draft-
ing materials. Revising often leads to rewriting, more revision, and more rewriting,
as Figure 9.1 illustrates. This cycle may be repeated several times before you have

a final version of your paper. Sometimes you must revise a great deal, and sometimes you
must revise only a little until you meet all the criteria listed earlier in this chapter.

Figure 9.1: The revising process

Ready
for editing

Revising

Rewriting

Revising
Rewriting
Revising

Drafting

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CHAPTER 9Section 9.2 Revising

Revising With Feedback
While it is very important that you spend time carefully revising and improving your
paper, it can be just as useful to obtain feedback from your peers or from your instruc-
tor. Your instructor might comment on portions of working drafts, or create peer editing

groups, or groups of your classmates
who will review and comment on
your draft essay. You might be given
peer editing instructions or a com-
menting sheet to direct the peer edit-
ing feedback. Whatever method your
class uses for commenting on drafts,
make sure that you ask for clarifica-
tion if you have any questions about
what the feedback means. Allow
plenty of time in between peer edit-
ing or instructor feedback and your
next phase of revision and develop-
ment. Requests to instructors that
occur the day before the paper is due
are generally too late to sufficiently
incorporate feedback. Check with
your instructor about the class policy
on this.

Revising Specific Components of the Essay
Revising does not mean just reading over your paper to make sure it does not contain any
errors. It means focusing your brain on the paper as a whole, not on individual words.
It requires taking a big-picture view of the paper and looking at it from a holistic, visual,
and organizational point of view. You might consider putting yourself in the shoes of your
readers when you revise and trying to determine whether what you have written will be
clear and understandable to your audience. You have four primary goals when you revise:
to make sure your paper is

• Focused
• Well structured and well organized
• Complete
• Coherent.

The purpose of revising is to make sure you have covered everything necessary in your
paper, to make sure that you have directly responded to the writing prompt, to make sure
that you have included sufficient evidence to support your main ideas, to make sure that
you have sufficiently analyzed this evidence, and to improve your organization of ideas.
When you revise, you will probably reorganize ideas, move information around so that
ideas flow better, combine and restructure information into well-constructed paragraphs,
rewrite content, and add material to support your ideas. You will also likely delete a lot
of what you have written. It is ideal that when you write your first draft you write much
more length-wise than what the assignment is asking for. Then you can go back and locate

Helena Schaeder Söderberg/Fuse/Thinkstock
Revising is the process of viewing your paper as a whole
to ensure that it is focused, well organized, coherent, and
complete.

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CHAPTER 9Section 9.2 Revising

the best ideas and develop those more fully, while deleting the content that is off track or
that does not directly respond to the prompt. When you revise, ask yourself the following
four questions.

Is the Paper Focused?
Does your paper have a single focus and a clear thesis statement, and does other mate-
rial in the paper relate to and support this thesis? Each body paragraph should directly
support your thesis statement, and every body paragraph should also offer evidence
to support your main point. This can mean quoting from a text or referring to specific
details from a personal experience, if you are writing a personal essay. Ask yourself
whether everything you have written in the paper is relevant. Relevance deals with how
well the content of your paper relates to your thesis and to the assignment. Every para-
graph in your paper should have a reason or serve a purpose; if it does not, it should
be removed. A great way to test this is to read your entire paper out loud to yourself. It
is generally much easier to hear places in your writing that are unclear than if you just
read the paper silently.

Is the Paper Well Structured and Well Organized?
Make sure your paper has a clear introduction, body, and conclusion and that each section
includes all the required elements discussed in the writing prompt. Verify that the main
points in the body of your paper are clear and organized into effective paragraphs. Look
at your paper visually. Are your ideas divided into standard paragraphs? What exactly is
a standard paragraph? A paragraph should generally not be longer than a page or page
and a half at most. Your paragraphs do not all have to be the same length, but bear in mind
that overly short paragraphs that are only a few sentences are certainly not sufficiently
developed. For most essays, a paragraph should not be shorter than about half a page. In
some cases with personal essays or in writing a creative short story, it may be appropriate
to occasionally write a very brief paragraph.

Every paragraph should include at least a topic sentence that directly relates to the the-
sis, specific evidence to support it, and several sentences of analysis explaining how that
evidence supports your paragraph’s main claim. It can be helpful to step back and look
at your paper visually. Make sure that your paragraphs are not significantly longer than a
page each. If you find one that is, it is likely that you have a subpoint in your paragraph,
and should create new paragraph when that subpoint begins. You should always ask your
instructor if you are uncertain what the assignment is asking you to do.

Is the Paper Complete?
Does your paper meet the assignment length? Often writing instructors do not mind if
you write a page beyond the requirement, but not writing enough is usually a problem
because it means that you have not developed a complete enough response to the prompt.
Review your paper to make sure you have included all the information necessary. Did you
develop a main point that directly responds to the prompt and develops that idea over the
course of several paragraphs? Go back and read the assignment to make sure you met all
requirements. If you have overlooked something, add the missing material to your paper.

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CHAPTER 9Section

9.3 Editing

Writers often do not understand how to include enough evidence into the body para-
graphs. Ideas cannot stand alone—writers always have to make sure to provide specific
evidence in every body paragraph; otherwise the ideas are unsupported. There is no per-
fect number of quotes that should occur in each paragraph, but each should have either
direct citation or paraphrase (though paraphrasing tends to have the best use in research
papers when one is paraphrasing historical information). To analyze a text carefully, one
must directly cite it. Only add additional quotes to a paragraph if they add something
new to the discussion.

Part of the purpose in a paper is to prove how your interpretation is supportable by con-
crete evidence and to explain how that evidence supports the ideas. In almost all cases, a
writing assignment asks writers to prove on the page how the interpretation is a reason-
able, well-supported one. Even if an instructor asks for a personal essay in which you are
to explain how you arrived at a position to a controversial topic, then you will still need
to use ample evidence to support your ideas.

Is the Paper Coherent?
The word coherent means “sticking together,” and revising for coherence means review-
ing your work to determine whether the connections between your ideas are clear and
whether your writing flows well. Writing that is coherent is easy to read and understand.
Again, reading out loud is an excellent method to check for coherence. It is much easier to
hear problems with coherence and moments when your writing may have gotten off track
than it is to catch these problems by simply reading the paper silently to yourself. If your
paper is coherent, it will not seem “choppy,” and readers will be able to follow along with
your ideas as they read. Coherence is achieved by organizing ideas well, and part of this
means including transitions appropriately.

Coherence also means organizing your ideas in a way that is logical, so that your ideas
and paragraphs progress, one building block at a time. The specific organization of your
paper depends entirely on the writing assignment. You might organize your ideas so that
they follow the progress of a novel, poem, or drama chronologically, or you might orga-
nize your ideas so that they develop thematically. For certain assignments, you might set
up causes first and later discuss the effects of a particular study or problem.

If you have progressed to this step in the writing process and find you are having trouble,
do not forget that help is available to you from several sources. If you have followed the
steps above and still need assistance understanding the assignment or generating ideas,
contact your instructor or teaching assistant to see whether they can offer any guidance.

9.3 Editing

There is revising your paper for content, and then there is editing your paper for clar-ity of language. Both processes are completely essential to writing a good paper. You should not worry much about editing your sentences for grammar and clarity while
you are developing your ideas. It is simply trying to accomplish too many things at the
same time to develop your ideas and write them flawlessly on the page all at once—and it

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CHAPTER 9Section 9.3 Editing

is unrealistic. No writer can do this in the first draft of a paper. Remember that revising is
a big-picture view, whereas editing considers individual elements and details very closely.
When you edit, you scrutinize issues such as language choices, the clarity and conciseness
of your writing, spelling, grammar, punctuation, and sentence structure. You edit when
you believe the content of your paper is complete or mostly complete. However, if new
ideas develop that help you to respond more fully to the writing prompt, by all means,
add them to the paper.

You might want to take a short break between revising and editing to “switch gears” for
the analysis you must perform during the editing step. It is impossible to look at all edit-
ing issues at once, so you must make several passes through your paper to read what
you have written, word for word. A good practice is to check one of the editing issues
discussed below in each of your editing passes.

Style and Language
When you write, your language focuses readers’ attention and creates impressions in their
minds. The language you choose depends on three factors: the purpose of the writing,
the audience, and the genre. Your college papers have an academic audience and will be
read by your instructors and teaching assistants, and perhaps by some of your peers in
your class. Recall that genre refers to a category of writing that has a particular form and
technique. Appropriate language and tone for one genre is not always appropriate for
another. Fiction writing, poetry, journalistic writing, business writing, marketing commu-
nications, and technical writing are all different genres. Academic writing, for example,
is a specific genre that tends to use a formal, educated, academic voice. In this text, for
example, we have adopted a conversational tone, as we would in a classroom discussion.
However, as we discussed earlier, college papers require formal language. In your college
writing assignments, you should avoid slang, jargon, and contractions. Avoid informal
language that you would use with friends and avoid using sayings or clichés. Often infor-
mal types of language such as these are a replacement for what a writer should be saying
in a paper—what she is arguing, how it is supported, and what the evidence suggests. The
personal essay is at times an exception to this rule, particularly if you are asked to write
about a personal experience.

Tone and Voice
Language also creates what is known as the tone of your writing. The tone of a piece of
writing may be positive, negative, warm, friendly, serious, sincere, humorous, or hos-
tile, to name a few possibilities. Most college writing assignments are formal essays that
require you to write in a way that follows the conventions of formal writing—a clear, seri-
ous, academic tone that seeks to treat the reader of the essay as an educated audience. This
means that your tone should always convey respect for your audience.

Remember that when you write a college paper that is a persuasive essay, and your pur-
pose is to convince readers to take some action, you might occasionally make an emotional
appeal to your readers. However, you must persuade primarily with logic and factual evi-
dence, not simply by appealing to emotions. Educated readers immediately know when
someone is trying to persuade them simply through emotions, and you would never want
your readers to feel manipulated—instead, you want them to think that you have argued

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CHAPTER 9Section 9.3 Editing

persuasively and effectively through sound reasoning, logic, and evidence. So, in these
papers as well, edit to avoid language that is overly emotional and attempt to find more
neutral terms for emotional words.

Denotations and Connotations
All forms of college writing, besides the personal essay, require language that is not overly
emotional. But what does overly emotional mean? In English, words have two types of
meaning: denotations and connotations. The denotation, or denotative meaning, is the
most descriptive and neutral dictionary definition of a word. The connotation is what
the word suggests or implies. Connotations give words their emotional impact, and this
impact can be either positive or negative. For example, the description of a person as “care-
ful with money,” uses fairly neutral denotative words to describe that person. However,
calling a person “stingy” creates a negative tone because the words has a strong negative
connotation. On the other hand, calling someone “thrifty” or “prudent” creates a positive
tone and a strong positive connotation of that person in the reader’s mind. Remember that
the language you choose reflects your attitude toward people, places, and things.

Trigger Words
We know from our conversations with others that people often react strongly to certain
language. Some words are trigger words that evoke such a strong emotional response in
us that we focus on the word itself instead of what we are listening to or reading. We all
have our own personal trigger words. However, some words are positive or negative to
almost everyone. For example, consider advertisements you have seen. Advertisers are
very aware of universal trigger words, so they do not say, “Buy our diet product; it will
make you skinny.” Instead, they use words with positive connotations and tell you their
product will make you slim or slender. Consider your audience and always avoid offensive
or sexist language in your writing.

Synonyms
Most words have synonyms, words that have similar meanings but may have very dif-
ferent connotations. When you edit, make sure to keep a thesaurus handy or use the
thesaurus in Microsoft Word® and review your writing to make sure your language is
appropriate for the academic writing genre. The tone of your college writing should be
clear and objective and should use words with neutral, denotative meanings. Academic
writing calls for serious, professional, and scholarly writing, which is largely achieved by
appropriate language choices and an engaged response to the writing prompt that shows
a serious attempt to answer the question.

Clarity and Conciseness
After checking the language in your paper, make a second editing pass to see if your writ-
ing is clear and concise. Clear writing is the result of expressing your ideas so that they
are understandable, and not confusing, to readers. You achieve clarity by making good
language choices such as using neutral, denotative words; avoiding slang and jargon;
being specific and not vague in your descriptions; and writing with a serious and profes-
sional tone. You also must make your essay as grammatically correct as possible because

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CHAPTER 9Section

9.4 Proofreading

grammatical errors can profoundly impact the clarity of your writing—your ideas may be
very good, but if they are not clear because what you are saying is not understandable,
your readers will have no idea what your good ideas are. If grammatical errors are a sig-
nificant concern for you, plan to get help early and often to work on these errors.

When writing is concise, it contains no unnecessary words. Conciseness is achieved by
making good language choices, focusing on subjects and verbs in your sentences, and
eliminating repetition and redundancies. Do not use multiple adjectives to describe one
item in a sentence—instead, choose the one adjective that is the most adequate descriptor.
Likewise, avoid using multiple verbs as synonyms side by side in a sentence. Of particular
concern is to avoid using passive voice, which includes versions of the verb “to be.” You
can use the word “is,” however, to describe something: “She is highly intelligent.”

9.4 Proofreading

Proofreading is not editing; when you proofread, your job is not to look for pos-sible language changes or to check whether punctuation and grammar is correct. These tasks should have been completed during editing, but if you do happen to
find more edits you should make,
you should of course go ahead and
complete these. Try to make sure you
complete each step as thoroughly as
you can before you move on to the
next one because it is much easier to
focus on only one or two elements at
a time. The purpose of proofreading
is to take one last look at your paper
to see if what is actually on the page is
what you think you wrote. To accom-
plish this task, you must shift your
focus from reading sentences to read-
ing individual words, and you must
read everything on the page such as
page headers, page numbers, sym-
bols, numbers, bullets, and punctua-
tion marks.

Proofreading Strategies
If you have been working on the computer screen while you revised and edited, print
your paper and proofread from the printed copy, with a pencil in hand so that you can
mark errors as you find them. It is generally more effective to proofread from a printed
page than to do so on the computer screen because you can see the errors more easily.
Taking a break between editing and proofreading is also recommended. Proofreading is
usually improved if you can look at your paper with fresh eyes.

When we read a paper we have written, we are often so absorbed in our subject that we
see what we think we wrote, not what is actually there. So, to proofread effectively, we
must fool our brain so that we read only one word at a time or one line of text at a time, not

iStockphoto/Thinkstock
After all edits have been performed, you should always
go back through your paper looking for errors in spelling,
punctuation, and formatting.

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CHAPTER 9Section 9.4 Proofreading

sentences and paragraphs, as we do with normal reading. Many people, therefore, adopt
special proofreading strategies to make sure they accomplish that goal. Below are some
strategies for you to try. Experiment with different methods until you find one that works
well for you or try a combination of strategies.

• Read aloud to yourself. Reading your paper aloud helps you determine the
flow, or coherence, of your writing. It can enable you to recognize sentences
that are awkward or difficult to understand. It can also help you identify sen-
tences that are too long. If you run out of breath before you get to the period
at the end of the sentence, you know that the sentence needs to be shorter. If
you try to read through a sentence and you simply cannot or you stumble as
you read, it is a sure sign that the sentence needs to be revised for clarity and/
or for grammatical errors. Remember, when you proofread, read only one
word at a time and read all punctuation marks aloud as well.

• Read aloud to someone else. Many writers belong to writing groups, and one of
the benefits of such groups is that you can obtain feedback from others. Read-
ing a paper aloud to someone else can help both you and your listener assess
the coherence of the paper. Additionally, it enables others to give you input
as to whether your ideas are clear and understandable. Peer editors are a
very useful part of the revision process. An instructor may set up peer editing
groups, or you may talk with someone in your class and ask to work as peer
editors for one another. A different perspective offers insight into the areas
that can be strengthened.

• Read aloud while someone else reads along silently. Print two copies of your paper
and proofread with another person. Read your paper aloud to someone else
while he or she reads along silently; if you wish, you can switch roles half-
way through. The person reading aloud is more likely to find problems with
sentence length, coherence, and clarity while the person reading silently will
often more easily see punctuation errors. You could exchange papers with
someone else in your class and promise to give each other extensive feed-
back. Peer editing is a very valuable technique for strengthening your papers.

• Have someone else proofread for you. If you are fortunate to have someone else
who can proofread your paper for you, you might want to take advantage of
the opportunity. Someone who is not as close to the paper as you are might
be able to spot errors you might overlook. Remember, though, the accuracy
of the final paper is your responsibility. Your instructors are not proofread-
ers, but there may be resources at your school that can assist you with some
proofreading.

• Proofread in a different location. Sometimes, moving away from the computer
and reading your paper while you are curled up on the sofa or sitting at the
kitchen table will give you a different perspective and enable you to find
errors more easily.

• Proofread with an index card. You might try moving an index card or a piece of
paper along as you proofread and covering words to the right of the word
you are reading. This technique forces you to read only one word at a time
and to read more carefully and slowly than you otherwise would.

• Proofread with a ruler. Another technique is to place a ruler under each line of
text as you read. Move the rule down the page, line by line, while you are
reading. This proofreading strategy forces you to read the line of text, not
the sentence, and can assist you in finding unnecessary words and sentence
structure errors.

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CHAPTER 9Section

9.5 The Final Draft

Microsoft Word® Tools
After you have edited the language in your paper, read through your paper again and edit
for proper spelling, grammar, punctuation, and sentence structure. You can obtain help
for this task from the automatic spelling- and grammar-checking features in Microsoft
Word®. Remember, however, that suggestions made by automatic checkers are not always
correct, so do not depend on them completely. Instead, check your paper yourself first;
then use the automatic checking features on the word processing software to check your-
self and see whether you missed anything.

References and Formatting
Make sure to review the format of your paper to ensure that it conforms to the required
documentation style. Make sure your margins are correct, that your paper is appropri-
ately spaced and paragraphs are indented as required, that your page header is included
and properly formatted, and that your title page and reference page (if needed) are pre-
pared properly. Also ensure that you have correctly cited all outside sources in the text of
your paper and in the reference list.

9.5 The Final Draft

With the final draft in hand, it is useful to take a moment to consider what you have learned and what you can continue to improve on. Writing out some answers to final draft reflective questions can make your future writing goals
more concrete. See Writing in Action: Final Draft Reflection Exercise for some examples of
reflective questions you can ask about your own paper.

Writing in Action: Final Draft Reflection Exercise

Try answering the following questions on a sheet of paper. Stating your outcomes from the writing
process helps clarify what you want as a writer and how you will attempt to accomplish those goals
in future writing assignments.

1. What are the strongest parts of the essay? Why?
2. Which parts of the essay did you work on the most?
3. If you had more time, what would you continue to work on?
4. What do you think is the weakest part of your paper?
5. For the next paper, what do you hope to improve on?

Finally, congratulate yourself. You have completed all the steps in the writing process,
and you should be ready to submit your paper, with the confidence that you have done
the best job you can do. Is the paper finished? Author and journalism professor Donald
M. Murray writes,

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CHAPTER 9Key Terms

A piece of writing is never finished. It is delivered to a deadline, torn out
of the typewriter on demand, sent off with a sense of accomplishment and
shame and pride and frustration. If only there were a couple more days,
time for just another run at it, perhaps then . . . . (Murray, 2002, p. 58)

A piece of writing is never perfect. Every time you read it, you will probably find some-
thing you could change. However, there comes a time when all writers have to give up
their desire for perfection and make sure they submit their writing on time. You always
want to make sure that you have gone through every step of the drafting process, and in
order to do that, you need to avoid procrastination, which is the number one roadblock
to writing effective essays. Writing is not like memorizing a set of formulas that you can
simply “plug in” to get the “correct” answer—instead, writing is a process of developing
your thoughts and articulating a clear position. This takes time to do, but it is extremely
rewarding because you learn how to articulate yourself better and because it gives an
occasion to clarify your thoughts about a subject.

Chapter Summary
No famous writers simply write a masterpiece the very first time they write—all writing
is in some sense a draft waiting for improvement. Revising, editing, and proofreading
are the cornerstones of all good writing. Writers should never feel pressure to create a
perfect work of art during the initial drafting stage. This unrealistic ideal only hinders the
writing process and adds unnecessary pressure. Sentences are not lifelong contracts; they
are always tentative, waiting for the benefit of another reading and revision. Because it
is impossible to create an ideal paper in one sitting, writing calls for planning and orga-
nizing one’s time carefully. Yet writing has many rewards—there is not only the obvious
reward of performing well on a paper, but there is also the less tangible reward of learning
from the writing process. Writing creates more capable thinkers by promoting analytical
thought and inquiry into important subjects.

Key Terms
coherence Clear connections between
ideas that facilitate the logical flow of a
paper.

connotation What a word suggests or
implies. Connotations give words their
emotional impact, and this impact can be
either positive or negative.

denotation The most descriptive and neu-
tral dictionary definition of a word.

editing A close check of the individual
elements and details in a paper. Editing
focuses on issues such as language choices,
the clarity and conciseness of the writing,
spelling, grammar, punctuation, and sen-
tence structure.

proofreading A final review of a paper to
ensure that what the author intended to
write is what the paper actually conveys.
Proofreading includes reading individual
words and reading everything on the
page such as page headers, page numbers,
symbols, numbers, bullets, and punctua-
tion marks.

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CHAPTER 9Key Terms

relevance How well the content of a paper
relates to the paper’s thesis and to the
assignment.

revision The process of rereading, reflect-
ing upon, and improving drafts or draft-
ing materials; includes attending to the
responsiveness to the writing prompt,
organization, cohesion, the thesis, argu-
ment development, use of evidence, gram-
mar, spelling, and proper formatting.

synonyms Words that have similar mean-
ings but that may have very different
connotations.

trigger words Words that evoke such a
strong emotional response in the reader
that he or she tends to focus on the word
itself instead of what is being read or lis-
tened to.

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