REVISION Nothing is sacred Rewriting Sometimes rewriting in

REVISION Nothing is sacred

Rewriting - Sometimes rewriting in various ways will help you become more focused or you may find a better way to write it. Revise to: Read and Re-read Sharpen your focus. Non-writers look to Strengthen the narrative. Improve the organization. For clarity. handbooks and textbooks for help with writing problems, rather than looking at the text itself. Writers look at the text for the solutions to the problems.

EDITING AND PROOFREADING Why is it important? Go over it piece by piece: Paragraphs Sentences Words Proofreading is where you clean up what you wrote and present it to your reader. Read slowly or backward to find spelling errors. READ OUT LOUD. Ask someone else to read it for you or to you.

MECHANICS Exclamation marks are for emphasis and only one should be used … ever! Question marks are only used after a direct question not after, “She asked if I knew the way to school. ” Use hyphens to form compound adjectives and divide words at the end of a line: long-term, germ-free, Oriental-art expert or Oriental art-expert. Parentheses tuck in extra material (dates, examples, time, explanations, etc). M-Dashes are used to set off elements--such as definitions. Use italics for titles of longer works and to show emphasis.

Things to Avoid Addressing the reader NEVER make assumptions! Vague references to “they” and “them” and “those guys” Writing how you speak Single spaced documents/Double spaced paragraphs Run-on sentences/Fragments Sweeping generalizations Fuzzy statistics Usually made up because the writer doesn’t want to have to create a citation

More Things to Avoid More than 20% directly quoted material For 40 lines of text, that’s less than 8 lines For 500 words, that’s less than 100 words Paraphrasing or Summarizing without giving credit Repeating something and saying it again In-text citations should be the FIRST WORD or phrase found on the Works Cited page for ease of checking sources. If it’s not obvious that a source was used in the text, I assume the worst and take points. In your sentences, don’t use the same word twice

Typos, Autocorrect, Silliness: This is no(t)w the time for hasty decisions. Therapist/the rapist 15 k income will be charged only 16 k in taxes – Bill Bradley