English 320, web-based Class
Lesson for Week 9: Day 1
9:1
Your assingment for today was to . . .
- Write a blog entry.
- Write a first complete draft of your discourse-in-your-field paper. Get
someone to read it for you and give you feedback. You don't have to have
the letter of transmittal, the title page, the table of contents, or the
abstract done yet, but you do need the
whole report from the introduction through the conclusions, along with the
references, done.
Today, we focus on the processes of revision and editing, and we look at report
apparatus.
Peer Review. Now that you have drafted a complete copy of
the paper, it's time to get someone else to read it. This peer review process
should be guided by your questions. Tell the reader what you were trying to
accomplish. Describe the paper, and point out areas where you would like the
reader to give you special feedback. You should as the reader specific questions
about the text, remembering that you are trying to find out how a reader unfamilar
with your text interprets it.
- Some times, you can simply as the reader to read a short section and to
summarize it back to you. That way you have a sense of whether or not what
you intended is what the reader picked up.
- You can ask for impressions--Do I say enough here to get the idea across
or does it seem a little thin to you?
- This is a section that seemed difficult to me. Would you read it and tell
me if you understand it and if not where things became murky for you?
- I ordered these ideas this way (explain the order) because I thought . .
. Does that order seem effective to you, or do you have a suggestion for changing
the order?
- This section, I'm trying to figure out if I really need it. Do you think
it needs to stay or should I cut it?
- What about the vocabulary in this section? Is it too technical, too elementary,
too stilted?
Revision. Based on such questions, you can move to the revision
process. Revision is re-vision. By asking someone else to read and comment on your
paper, you have asked for someone else's view--you have tried to see your paper through
the eyes of a reader not yourself. Having relocated your perspective, you can now
look at the paper yourself anew and imagine how it could be made better from that
perspective; hence the term "revision."
Revision is not editing. Editing works at the surface level and is the last thing
a writer or editor does before publication. Revision comes earlier; it reshapes the
paper. Generally speaking there are five things you can do to revise.
- Re-order. Often in the first draft of a document, the force of what you
have just written leads you on to something that follows in your flow of thoughts.
That is usually a good thing because it leads you to say more, to elaborate.
However, sometimes that process leads to your getting off track. You say something
now that should be saved for later, or you think of something now that really
belonged in an earlier section. When you re-order, you move things around,
perhaps only clauses in a sentence, perhaps sentences in a section, perhaps
paragraphs within sections, perhaps sections within the whole.
- Substitute. In the struggle to compose and draft, you often settle for a
sentence that you know is not very clear, or you grab a word that you know
isn't quite right, or you latch onto a piece of evidence to support your argument,
but you know there is better evidence. We settle for these approximations
because we don't want to lose the momentum of composition; we don't want to
come out from under the influence of what ever muse is moving us along. But
now, you have distance. Revision isn't muse-like, so you can appraise your
work and take time to come up with better words, sentences, evidence. In other
words, you substitute something better.
- Embed. During composition, the desire to follow the flow of thoughts can
lead to a stringing section; that is, instead of the sentences having a clear
hierarchical relationship to one another, they tend to be related on the basis
of "oh, yeah, and here's another thing that occurs to me." Remember when we
talked about classification, we said that classification leads us to group
like things with like. When we explored document design, we saw the principle
of proximity (putting like things visually with other like things). To embed
is to take something that appears to be just an additional comment or section
and to subsume it under something else. It means to place something inside
something else. This is what we do when we classify--we put things inside
categories. So embedding is really the process of adopting a vision that leads
to hierarchical structures, limiting the total number of divisions and drawing
material in under the superordinate terms of those divisions. Sometimes we
embed sentences within sentences by changing one to a subordinate clause so
that we don't have a series of choppy sentences. Sometime we embed concepts
within larger concepts, realizing that this "additional" comment is really
subordinate to a larger concept.
- Delete: What do you do with sentences or concepts or sections that can't
be brought in under superordinate terms? Despite the temptation to let them
stand or to elaborate on them so that they become their own dynasty, the best
solution is to cut them out. Ouch! It took effort to compose them, and now
you're going to have to kill them. But this is to be expected. Our minds generate
many associations and new insights as we compose and draft. Sometimes these
new insights are the best things in the paper, and we reform the paper to
accommodate them, but sometimes they are undeveloped (promising perhaps) and
premature. They need to go.
- Add: Clearly, there are times when we recognize holes in our drafts, especially
in developing our arguments. Perhaps we've made claims but we haven't supported
the claims with evidence. If you can't support a claim, you should cut it,
but sometimes the claim is crucial to your argument. So now you have to find
evidence. Return to the discussion of logos and
consider Toulmin's structure or argument. If you can't find the data and the
warrant to support your claim, you have a weak argument and need to add more.
Editing. It's only after you have shaped the draft the way
you want it, have used the wording and sentences to say it as you want to say
it, and have included all the material you want to include, that you should
move on to editing. Editing takes care of errors, such as spelling errors, grammar
errors, punctuation errors. For a brief introcuction to punctation, go to my
online punctuation rules. This material is part of a web lesson on sentence
structure. Sometimes this process is referred to as proofreading, and I
would suggest that you read Handbook of Tecnical Writing's section on
proofreading. There you will find a page of proof reader's marks and a list
of proofreading stages. We're not doing editing justice here at all--in many
writing programs you can take a full class on editing.
Report Apparatus. So you think you're done now, but no, you
still have to add the report apparatus, the elements of a formal report. Read
Handbook of Tecnical Writing's section on formal reports. The assignment
for this paper asked you to use a letter of transmittal, a title page, a table
of contents, and an abstract for your front matter. Read about these in HTW
to see what they are and to find out about how you are supposed to number them.
There is an example of a formal report in this section of the book. The book
calls for and "executive summary." You do NOT need to write one of those for
this assignment. You do need a reference page, but you should follow the APA
style for documentation (see "documenting sources" in HTW for details).
If you can't lay your hands on the Handbook, look at a basic
introduction to formal report elements online.
Your Assignment for next time is to . . .
Write a final draft of your discourse-in-your-field paper. Compose the letter
of transmittal, the title page, the table of contents, and the abstract (see
entries in HTW). Send the final draft of the report, its front matter,
the references, and the appendix to me as an email attachment. If you are still
having trouble conceptualizing the structure of an empirical research report,
take a look at this example (about
the control of pollen in maize). It has the Introduction with a lit review,
the methods section, the results and discussion section, and the conclusions.
It does NOT have the report apparatus, and it is NOT in APA format (though it
is very close to APA), so in these respects it is not a good example, but the
overall patter of the report proper is.
The assignment calls for
you to hand in the doucment you analyze as an appendix. If you can scan that
document
and send it as a PDF, fine. If not, you may get that to me as a hard copy document.
Contact me if you have problems getting that to me. Here is my scoring
rubric of this paper. You can use it as a checklist to verify that you're
on the right course. You may also look at a
report by Robert Jentz. This report is a very good example of the kind
of report I'm looking for; the only real criticism I have of it is that the
purpose statement does not come early enough in the introduction.
Read Lannon's discussion of documents
and project cycles.
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