Part 1: Revising and Editing
1. Go through each section below and self-evaluate your first draft by checking if you did or did not complete the task.
2. If you did not complete task, give a brief explanation of why.
Revising and Editing Overall Tips
☒ Is your paper double spaced?
☒ Have you printed out a copy to read over?
☒ Did you visually scan your paper for paragraph length? Paragraphs that are either too long or shorter than the others may need some revision.
☒ Have you read your paper aloud to catch errors?
☒ Have you given your paper to a friend/instructor/CLA tutor to review?
Revising
☒ Did you reread the assignment details?
☒ Now that you have a draft, is your thesis statement clear, limited, and interesting, and is it supported in your draft? Does your thesis statement contain a main point and three subtopics?
☒ Are all your sources cited correctly? Does each parenthetical citation have a matching entry on the Reference page? Does every entry on the Reference page have matching parenthetical references?
☒ Review your introduction. Do you have a strong hook that engages the reader?
☒ Review the conclusion. Does it sum up your main points and restate the thesis?
☒ Does each paragraph have a strong topic sentence?
☒ Do all sentences support the topic sentence?
☒ Is the paragraph organized logically?
☒ Do the sentences transition smoothly and logically?
☒ Is each paragraph supported with sufficient details, examples, statistics, facts, research?
Editing
☒ Did you correct suggestions made by your word processing program’s spell check and grammar check?
☒ What errors have teachers most corrected on your past papers? Did you check for those same errors on this paper?
Did you check for some of the most common errors in your paper?
☒ Comma splices/Run-ons ☒ Sentence Fragments
☒ Subject/verb agreement ☒ Faulty parallelism
☒ Misplaced commas ☒ Misused colons, semicolons
☒ Commonly confused words (for example- there, their)
Are there any words that you use repeatedly in your paper?
The word “carnival” is used repeatedly in our paper.
Consider word choice. Can you identify any sentences/phrases which are awkward and need to be rephrased?
The awkward sentence “My friends, though, have stopped asking want to go out to the carnival.” need to be rephrased.
Could your sentence structure use more variety?
Our sentence structure could use more variety with the help of passive constructions.
Part 2: Strengths and Weaknesses
Go through each component description below; then give a brief explanation of what you did well and what you can improve upon and your reasoning why.
Part 3: Summary and Reflection
Directions: Please write a summary based on the guidelines given below; write your summary in the space provided.
In 250-300 words address the following:
After reviewing your strengths and weaknesses, what will you do the same and what will you do differently when completing your next college essay?
What are some resources that you can use to help improve your areas of weakness?
What advice would you give a new student to help with writing their first college essay?
Summary:
Draft reflected that we have developed an appropriate course toward achieving best results for our paper. After rereading the assignment details we observed that our thesis statement contains a main point and is clear, limited and supported in my draft.
Our introduction includes a strong hook that engages the reader. Our conclusion sums up our main points and restates our thesis.
So we checked whether each statement in our draft self-evaluation and reflection had an evidence to support it, an action for judgment and the judgement itself. After reviewing our strength and weaknesses we observe that our strong point is in the use of genuine stylistic devices. We used our own vision and word selection opposed to the popular clichés. But unfortunately our weak points are the misplaced commas, sentence fragments and formatting. With my next college essay we will pay more attention to the grammatical and punctuation aspects of writing. We highly recommend to use dictionaries, grammar books, spelling and punctuation checking software in order to improve your areas of weakness as well as thesauruses, books about lexicology and stylistic to provide you with enough language basis for completing such an undertaking task. For the students who are going to write their first college essay we would advice to mind the plagiarism, not to forget to cite and give a credit to the author and to revise your work as carefully as possible. They should not just paraphrase or find synonyms for words of other person but share their opinion on the subject matter.
