4.5: Editing the Paper- Sentence Level Issues

If you have walked through all of the steps for revision in Chapter 3, you have spent some time reconsidering the paper as a whole. So far, all your changes have been content changes. Perhaps with the help of a peer, your teacher, or a tutor, you have made sure that you sufficiently supported your ideas. You have checked for problems with unity and coherence.

The next step after revising the content is editing. When you edit, you examine the surface features of your text. You examine your spelling, grammar, usage, and punctuation. You also make sure you use the proper format when creating your finished assignment.

Editing often takes time. Budgeting time into the writing process allows you to complete additional edits after revising. Editing and proofreading your writing helps you create a finished work that represents your best efforts. Here are a few more tips to remember about your readers:

• Readers do not notice correct spelling, but they do notice misspellings.
• Readers look past your sentences to get to your ideas—unless the sentences are awkward, poorly constructed, and frustrating to read.
• Readers notice when every sentence has the same rhythm as every other sentence, with no variety.
• Readers do not cheer when you use there, their, and they’re correctly, but they notice when you do not.
• Readers will notice the care with which you handled your assignment and your attention to detail in the delivery of an error-free document

Chapter 20 offers a useful review of grammar, and Chapter will help with common sentence errors. Chapters 18 and 19 will help you with punctuation. Use these chapters to help you eliminate major errors in your writing and refine your understanding of the English conventions.

See this video from the Writing Center at UNC Chapel Hill for help with flow in your paper. Do not hesitate to ask for help, too, from the peer tutors in the learning lab or the editors at the Online Writing Lab. In the meantime, use the following checklists to help you edit your writing.

Checklists for Editing Your Writing with Helpful Page Numbers

Sentence Structure

• Are all my sentences simple sentences, or do I vary my sentence structure?
• Have I chosen the best coordinating or subordinating conjunctions to join clauses?
• Have I created long, overpacked sentences that should be shortened for clarity?
• Do I see any mistakes in parallel structure?

Grammar

• Are some sentences actually sentence fragments?
• Are some sentences run-on sentences? How can I correct them?
• Do some sentences need conjunctions between independent clauses?
• Does every verb agree with its subject?
• Is every verb in the correct tense?
• Are tense forms, especially for irregular verbs, written correctly?
• Have I used subject, object, and possessive personal pronouns correctly?
• Have I used who and whom correctly?
• Is the antecedent of every pronoun clear?
• Do all personal pronouns agree with their antecedents?
• Have I used the correct comparative and superlative forms of adjectives and adverbs?
• Is it clear which word a participial phrase modifies, or is it a dangling modifier?

Punctuation

• Does every sentence end with the correct end punctuation?
• Can I justify the use of every exclamation point? (Remember to use exclamation points sparingly if at all in college writing)
• Have I used apostrophes correctly to write all singular and plural possessive forms?
• Have I used quotation marks correctly?

Mechanics and Usage

• Can I find any spelling errors? How can I correct them?
• Have I used capital letters where they are needed?
• Have I written abbreviations, when allowed, correctly?
• Can I find any errors in the use of commonly confused words, such as to/too/two?

Be careful about relying too much on spelling checkers and grammar checkers. A spelling checker cannot recognize that you meant to write principle but wrote principal instead. A grammar checker often queries constructions that are perfectly correct. The program does not understand your meaning; it makes its check against a general set of formulas that might not apply in each instance. If you use a grammar checker, accept the suggestions that make sense, but consider why the suggestions came up.

However, if you do not have time to seek help from the OWL or the tutoring center and you struggle with punctuation and grammar, consider using the Grammarly for last minute help if you don’t have other options. This will find a lot of your basic punctuation and grammar issues, explain them to you, and suggest fixes.

As noted earlier in the chapter, proofreading requires patience; it is very easy to read past a mistake. Set your paper aside for at least a few hours, if not a day or more, so your mind will rest. Some professional proofreaders read a text backward so they can concentrate on spelling and punctuation. Another helpful technique is to slowly read a paper aloud, paying attention to every word, letter, and punctuation mark. If you need additional proofreading help, ask a reliable friend, a classmate, or a peer tutor to make a final pass on your paper to look for anything you missed.