Revising and Editing Your Research Paper

Self-Revision In the revision step, focus on the following questions and strategies:  Assignment requirements: Did you fulfill all the expectations for the assignment?  Reread the directions to be sure.

Self-Revision  Audience and purpose: Does your content take your audience into consideration? Have you fulfilled your initial purpose to inform your reader about a certain topic?

Self-Revision Content and organization:  Does the overall organization of the paper make sense logically?  As you read your paper, revise content where necessary. Rearrange words and sentences for a stronger affect, and rewrite passages that may not be clear.

Self-Revision: Content and Organization Introduction:  Does your introduction catch the reader’s attention?  You can catch your reader’s attention in a number of ways: by telling a story, providing a shocking statistic or quotation, or explaining an interesting fact.  Have you included your thesis statement at the end of the introduction?  Have you avoided jumping right into the supporting evidence for the body of the paper?

Self-Revision: Content and Organization Supporting details:  Is each sub topic thoroughly explained through the use of examples, reasons, facts, data, case studies, stories, and so forth?  Is your writing free of bias and fallacies?

Self-Revision: Content and Organization Conclusion:  Does your conclusion neatly wrap up the paper while making an impact on the reader?  Have you avoided simply repeating your introduction?  You can say something interesting or memorable in your conclusion, but again, avoid using the conclusion to add new information or to support your thesis.

Self-Revision: Content and Organization Transitions:  Have you used transitions to move readers smoothly from paragraph to paragraph; from sentence to sentence; and from your own writing into quotations, paraphrases, or summaries?

Self-Revision Unity and coherence:  Does every paragraph have a topic sentence?  Do all the supporting paragraphs relate to this one main idea?  Is the writing clear, concise, and understandable?

Self-Revision Tone and vocabulary:  Are your voice and tone consistent throughout the paper?  Your paper needs to be written from a third- person point of view (no I or you pronouns) and without slang or contractions.  To create a more lively tone, try writing a variety of sentence types.  Replace words that are too advanced for your audience, not descriptive enough, or vague.

Self-Revision Documentation:  Does every paraphrase, summary, and quotation have an in-text citation?  Are all references cited in the paper also listed on a Works Cited page at the end of the paper?  Did you use MLA format? It may help to print your paper and highlight all the passages that include sources to ensure each citation has a corresponding reference.

Self-Revision Paper formatting:  Have you ensured that the paper’s font, margins, spacing and style conform to the guidelines?

Editing Editing is the final step in the revision process. Editing involves looking for technical errors in your paper such as spelling, grammar, sentence structure, and punctuation.

Editing Sentence structure:  Have you avoided fragments (sentences that are too short because they do not constitute a complete thought) and run-ons (sentences that are too long because they continue without a proper punctuation mark or break)?

Editing Punctuation and capitalization:  Are capital letters, periods, commas, apostrophes, and other punctuation marks used correctly?

Editing Spelling and word usage:  Always use the spell-check tool on your computer.  However, the spell-checker does not pick up every misspelled or misused word, so be sure to review your paper thoroughly for spelling errors.

Think you are finished? READ IT AGAIN! Take a break READ IT AGAIN! Have someone else read it READ IT AGAIN!