Edit and proofread your draft.
A Note on Grammar and Spelling Checkers
These tools can be helpful, but do not rely on them exclusively to catch errors in your text: Spelling checkers cannot catch misspellings that are themselves words, such as to for too. Grammar checkers miss some problems, sometimes give faulty advice for fixing problems, and can flag correct items as wrong. Use these tools as a second line of defense after your own (and, ideally, another reader’s) proofreading and editing efforts.
Our research indicates that particular errors occur often in essays that justify an evaluation: incomplete and illogical comparisons, and short, choppy sentences. The following guidelines will help you check your essay for these common errors.
Making Complete, Logical, and Grammatically Correct Comparisons
The Problem In essays that justify an evaluation, writers often engage in comparison—showing, for example, that one film is stronger than another, a new recording is inferior to an earlier one, or one restaurant is better than another. When comparisons are expressed incompletely, illogically, or incorrectly, however, the point of the comparison can be dulled or lost completely.
The Correction Reread your comparisons, checking for completeness, logic, and correctness.
A comparison is complete if two terms are introduced, and the relationship between them is clearly expressed:
A comparison rms compared are parallel (and therefore comparable):
Note that different from is correct; different than, though commonly used, is incorrect:
Combining Sentences
The Problem When writers justify an evaluation, they generally present their subject in some detail—defining it, describing it, placing it in some context. Inexperienced writers often present such details one after another, in short, choppy sentences. These sentences can be difficult or irritating to read, and they provide the reader with no help in determining how the different details relate to one another.
The Correction Combine sentences to make your writing more readable and to clarify the relationships among ideas. Two common strategies for sentence combining involve converting full sentences into appositive phrases (a noun phrase that renames the noun or pronoun that immediately precedes it) or verbal phrases (phrases using words derived from verbs that function as adjectives, adverbs, or nouns). Consider the following example:
From three separate sentences, this writer smoothly combines details about the “different impression” into a single sentence, using an appositive phrase (“a comic or perhaps even pathetic impression”) and a verbal phrase (“based on the boy’s attempts to dress up like a real westerner”).
Here are two additional examples of the first strategy (conversion into an appositive phrase):
Finally, hereexamples of the second strategy (conversion into a verbal phrase):
