Lesson 11: Revising Tips, continued

Welcome back class! Here are the promised revising tips.

The first thing to look out for when revising is the content of your paper. Content is KING! It doesn't matter if you meet the format and length requirements if what you are saying is incorrect, insufficient, or poorly written. Carefully go through your entire paper. I would suggest focusing on one paragraph at a time, inspecting every sentence and seeing if it all make sense. For your body paragraphs, does every sentence fall under the topic sentence of that paragraph? If it doesn't add to the overall meaning and purpose of that paragraph, it needs to either be deleted or revised. Also, does the topic sentence of every paragraph contribute to and help prove your thesis statement? If not, the paragraph needs some serious revisions.

Revising is a major part of the writing process. It is not something that you spend 20 minutes doing, simply looking for spelling and grammatical errors. As important as these things are, it isn't what revising is all about. If you are truly revising a paper, the revised draft should look drastically different from your first draft. Remember, content is king, and we'll discuss more revising tips next time.