Revise your Sentences and Diction
Having revised the largest elements of your composition, turn next to the sentences themselves. Again, the best approach is to ask yourself specific questions. Use the following list:
- Do my sentences convey my thoughts clearly?
- Do I subordinate less important ideas to more important ones?
- Do my sentences emphasize the most important part of the thought?
- Are they varied?
- Are my sentences complete sentences?
- Have I unintentionally written any sentence fragments?
- Are any of my sentences comma splices or run-ons?
You may find that some of your sentences are long and rambling and that others are short and choppy, giving the impression that your thoughts are disconnected. Perhaps you shifted focus within some sentences or used the same sentence pattern throughout most of your composition. Sentence problems like these may drive you to reconsider paragraphs you previously thought were effective. Again, all this is good. Writing is recursive, moving back and forth between larger and smaller elements and among the various stages.
WPTips
Saving Materials
You never know when sections of text (more than a few phrases or sentences), references, or quotations you wish to delete from a draft may later prove useful, sometimes even after you have completed an assignment. Block off the material you want to delete, and move it to the end of your file in a section labeled “Supplementary Material.” When you are finished writing, print only up to that point, saving the file with the supplementary material intact.
Now look at your diction or use of words. Do you use the word tedious when you mean dull? Do you use man when you mean human? Do you use three words when one would do? To revise for diction, ask yourself the following questions, using the cross-referenced sections for help.
- Is my diction exact, with each word meaning precisely what I think it does?
- Do I engage my reader with concrete nouns and strong action verbs?
- Do I use appropriate language, avoiding slang, regional language, pompous language, and doublespeak?
- Is my language unbiased?
- Is my writing fresh and forceful or burdened by unnecessary words?
Some aspects of editing allow for personal choice. Another writer, for example, might have changed the opening of the first sentence to As a sports fan who is also a purist. Both revisions solve the problem of wordiness. Of course outright errors must be corrected.
When you have finished writing your draft, give it an honest appraisal. Focus on the large issues of thesis, purpose, content, organization, and paragraph structure that affect your entire composition. It would be counter-productive to look at grammar and punctuation, for example, if the elements that make an essay “go” need work. Suppose you inherit an old car. Anyone can see that it badly needs a new paint job, but should you spend the money to have the work done if you do not know whether the car runs? What if you discover after you have invested in a paint job that the engine needs extensive repairs or, worse yet, is not worth fixing at all? So it is with writing. First you revisework on the large issues that clarify your purpose and improve your organization-and then you edit-check for correctness and style.