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HOMEWORK |
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Up to this point, the focus in developing the paper has been on offering a solid thesis, supporting it with strong evidence, anticipating alternative perspectives and responding to those decisively. Ask yourself the following questions:
| Have you clearly articulated your thesis? |
| Do your main arguments give the reasons for "Why your thesis is so?" |
| Have you supported these with credible and relevant evidence? |
| Have you adequately addressed alternative perspectives? |
| What additional reading or research do you need in order to strengthen your thesis and arguments? |
After you have more clearly articulated your thesis and arguments by responding to these questions, you can spend some time thinking about the overall presentation. Whether you began with an outline or with a map, you must now confirm that your presentation is organized clearly and logically for the reader by creating an outline from your current version.
Read what you have written, make margin notes on the purpose of each paragraph, and then take these notes and arrange and rearrange as needed. It is a lot easier to rethink the organization when you are looking at brief notations than when you are looking at the entire text. After you have rearranged your notations, you can cut and paste your document to match the new outline.
Once you are satisfied with the organization:
| Provide transitions between paragraphs that indicate to the reader how each paragraph relates to your thesis |
| Develop an engaging and informative introduction |
| Look for evocative language that allows you to tie each section of the paper to the thesis without becoming repetitious |
| Come up with a conclusion that returns us to the primary thesis of your paper and gives us ideas about where we can take it next |
As you wrote the second draft, you continued to incorporate new evidence, refine your thinking and the overall organization and development of your work.
In preparing your final draft, you need to be able to focus on presentation and style, and eliminate distracting errors or breaks in organization, i.e. you need to edit. Editing your final draft includes the following:
| Reading carefully for flow and consistency |
| Reading aloud for sentence boundaries and structure variation |
| Proofreading for grammar, punctuation, and spelling |