Please staple this to the top of the copy you turn in. Keep other drafts.

You may be your own editor or ask a friend, parent, or significant other to read your paper. Be sure your reader is someone who cares about your grade.

First Reading:

____ Scan the paper. If the paper isn't divided into plenty of paragraphs (at least three per page), return the paper to the writer for paragraphing.

____ Does the paper seem balanced? If the intro or conclusion is longer than the body of the paper, the writer needs to cut some places and add to others.

____ Does the paper seem to be going somewhere? If it's not clear what the purpose of the paper is... back to the drawing board.

Second Reading:

____ Read each paragraph slowly. Write "show" or "develop" in each place where a clearer picture is needed. The operative expression, always is "show, don't tell." If yours is a typical paper, it will need much more showing to become a lively, non-monotonous piece of writing. Another way to develop is to add dialogue, if appropriate.

Third Reading:

____ Overhaul the introductory paragraph, if necessary, to make it more interesting. That dull intro you began with can be scrapped now that you have the paper together (say adios to "It was a dark and stormy night."). Suggestions for a lively beginning--start with a picture, or with dialogue. Create suspense that causes the reader to want to keep reading. Then back up in the next paragraphs and give the reader the information he/she needs to understand the story and move through the narrative.

____ Move through the paper paragraph by paragraph. Ask yourself if each paragraph links logically to the paragraph before it and the one following it. Repeated words help here... also, looking at some model papers may give you help with transitions.

____ When this is done, move through each paragraph sentence by sentence. How many of the sentences in any paragraph start with the same word? How many have a standard subject-verb construction? Refine here by improving sentence variety. Remember that length, also, is a component of sentence diversity. If all your sentences are long, throw in a sentence occasionally that's three words long. That will wake up your reader.

____ Read one last time for grammar and punctuation. If you've only used declarative sentences, perhaps a question would work somewhere. Check trick words like "there" and "their" and "they're," which the spell-checker doesn't catch.

____ Finally, spell-check. Print double-spaced in type no larger than 12 point.

HUMANITIES - RESOURCES