- Your thesis statement, for context
- Your original paragraph
- The revised paragraph
- A paragraph evaluating your revisions and their impact on the audience, purpose, and meaning of your draft as a whole
Below is a review of some sentence level constructions to look for as you revise your paragraphs. If you need any additional explanation, your e-handbook is a great resource for information and examples, especially chapters 30-46.
Sentence style:
- Emphasis- are the ideas that you want to emphasize at the end of your sentences?
- Climactic order- are ideas arranged in increasing order of importance?
- Conciseness- are there redundant words that you can eliminate? Are there any empty words or meaningless modifiers (absolutely, awfully, definitely, great, literally, really, very, etc.)
- Replace wordy phrases- See page 685 of the e-handbook for a list of concise replacements for wordy phrases.
- Coordination- make the precise relationship between ideas clear with the appropriate coordinators, either coordinating conjunctions or semicolons.
- Subordination- have you distinguished minor ideas from major ones with the appropriate subordinating conjunctions or dependent clauses?
- Sentence variety- are the length of your sentences varied? Are the openings of your sentences varied, or do you finding several sentences in a row the same way?
- Eliminate expletives- avoid starting sentences with there or it followed by a form of to be or other linking verb.
Sentence Clarity and Grammar- Revise for:
- Sentence fragments
- Sentence sprawl
- Misplaced and dangling modifiers
- Faulty parallelism
- Unclear pronoun reference
- Pronoun agreement
- Incorrect pronoun case
- Omitted commas
- Superfluous commas
- Comma splices
- Apostrophe errors
- Words easily confused
No comments:
Post a Comment