College Composition

College Composition Study Guide

• Record yourself reading your draft aloud. Some people may feel silly or self-conscious doing this, but this is a simple way of hearing your text read aloud. Most modern phones have a voice recording app built in, or one can be downloaded easily. • Outline your text, then read the outline aloud. This will focus your attention on the organization of your work. As mentioned earlier, this can be especially effective when comparing pre-writing and post-writing outlines. For kinesthetic learners, the key to effective revising strategies is finding ways to feel and move the ideas and text. If you are a kinesthetic learner, you may find it useful to: • Write sections or paragraphs on notecards and rearrange them. This is an easy way to try out a new organization, and all types of learners may find it effective. Alternately, you can print out the text on paper, then cut between paragraphs to rearrange the pieces. • Look at different versions of your work side-by-side. If you are only on the first draft, try looking at your outline and text, or your pre-writing and post-writing outlines side-by-side. Looking from one paper to the other will help engage the movement parts of your brain. • Take frequent breaks when revising your paper. Getting up and moving around periodically are important for the kinesthetic learner and sitting too long to work on revision can cause the mind to lose focus. Some kinesthetic learners find it very effective to walk around while re- reading the text. 7.4 Editing After the revising process is complete, a writer can begin the editing process. Editing involves analyzing each sentence for correctness and coherence. Changes are made on the and sentence and word level to make sure each sentence is clear, grammatically correct and accurate (correctness) and fits well with the other parts of the paragraph (coherence). When checking for correctness, you can ask yourself these questions: • Does each sentence contain a subject and verb? • Do all the subjects and verbs agree? • Do all the pronouns and antecedents agree? • Are the independent clauses properly punctuated? • Are the proper tenses used? You should also double-check that the evidence, quotations and statistics are written correctly. For example, a major error would be incorrectly typing a “335% increase” when the statistic should read a “35% increase”. You can check your work for coherence by asking yourself these questions • Are sentence-level transitions used to show the connections between the ideas? • Is there a good mix of simple, compound, and complex sentence structures? • Are parallel structures used when discussing ideas of similar importance?

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