Writing Topic: Rules for Writers chapter 3

In Chapter 3 we took a look at writing, revising and proofreading our essays.  Writing is rarely a one step process and the first step after writing your first draft is to revise your paper.  Revision needs to happen broadly at first by not focusing on sentence structure and mechanics but on the ideas, purpose, organization and content. We start big and work our way to sentence structure later because there is no reason to rewrite sentences if they do not apply to the main purpose of the paper and will get cut out eventually.

After we look at the paper broadly, we focus in on revising and editing the remaining sentences. Grammar and sentence structure are what keep the reader interested and knowing that you are passionate about the information in your paper. Reading the essay out loud will help the fluency of the paper and your ability to increase the effectiveness of the paper. Proofreading is the final step of revising your paper and is a slow and methodical search for mistakes in each sentence. Some problems that arise when proof reading are that errors are difficult to spot in your own work because you read what you intended to write so a solution to this problem would be to read the paper aloud or to start at the end of the paper and read the sentences in reverse order back to the beginning.

I thought it was an interesting idea to proofread your paper backwards because you jumble up the meaning of the paper and have to focus on each individual sentence and not the paper as a whole. Another idea that would be helpful for me would be to start revising an essay by looking at it broadly and checking the ideas against the purpose on the paper and make sure that they support the thesis before moving on to grammar and sentence structure.