theguide11e

Improving the Draft: Revising, Editing, and Proofreading

Start improving your draft by reflecting on what you have written thus far:

Review critical reading comments from your classmates, instructor, or writing center tutor: What are your readers getting at?
Consider your invention writing: What else should you consider?
Review your draft: What can you do to present your argument more compellingly?

Revise your draft.

If your readers are having difficulty with your draft, or if you think there is room for improvement, try some of the strategies listed in the Troubleshooting Guide that follows. It can help you fine-tune your presentation of the genre’s basic features.

A TROUBLESHOOTING GUIDE

Click the Troubleshooting Guide to download.

A Clear, Arguable Thesis

My thesis is unclear or overgeneralized.

Add more explanation.
Refer to the story specifically.
Add qualifying words like some or usually.

My thesis is not arguable or interesting.

Respond to a question or class discussion.
Summarize an alternative argument.
Try additional suggestions for analysis from the Ways In activities in the section “Analyze the story.”

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A Well-Supported Argument

My argument seems superficial or thin.

Develop your ideas by connecting them.
Link your ideas to make a chain of reasoning.
Connect to a literary motif or theme.
Add textual evidence by quoting, paraphrasing, or summarizing important passages.
Focus on the writer’s choice of words, explaining how particular word choices support your ideas.
Consider using other kinds of support, such as information about the story’s historical or cultural context.

The connection between a reason and its support seems vague.

Explain why the support illustrates the point you are making.
Explain what the quoted words imply — their connotative (cultural or emotional) associations as well as their denotative (literal or dictionary) meanings.
Introduce quotations, and follow them with some analysis or explanation.
Explain more fully and clearly how your reasons relate logically to one another as well as to your thesis.
Fill in the gaps.
Use contradictions or gaps to extend or complicate your argument.

A Clear, Logical Organization

My essay is hard to follow.

Repeat key terms from the thesis and other introductory text.
Provide explicit topic sentences.
Add logical transitions.

Edit and proofread your draft.

Our research has identified several errors that occur often in essays that analyze short stories, including problems with parallelism and the use of ellipsis marks. The following guidelines will help you check your essay for these common errors.

Using Parallel Structure

The Problem When you present items as a pair or in a series (for example, I gave him x and y; or I gave him x, y, and z), you must present the items in the series in the same grammatical form — all nouns, all prepositional phrases, all adverb clauses, and so on. Mixing and matching leads to lack of clarity and lessens the impact of your prose. Take as an example one of Iris Lee’s first-draft sentences:

The doctor’s actions actually hurt rather than providing any benefit to the patient.

“Hurt” is a one-word verb; “providing any benefit to,” which should be a parallel item, combines an -ing verb, an adjective, an object, and a preposition. The resulting sentence is unnecessarily complicated and clumsy.

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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.

The Correction Lee eventually edited the sentence as follows:

The doctor’s actions actually hurt rather than a patient.

The parallelism of hurt and help puts the verbs in the same form and emphasizes the contrast between these two actions in a way that the first-draft wording did not. For more examples, see the following sentences:

This image comes more from anything he’s observed.
To Kafka, loneliness, and regrets are the price of freedom.
Sarah really cares about her brother and their relationship. She lets us know that she was injured by her mother’s abuse but avoids saying what she felt after the incident, how others reacted to the incident, and pain she endured.

Using Ellipsis Marks Correctly

You will often quote sources when you analyze a story, and you must be careful to use ellipsis marks (or ellipses) — three spaced periods — to indicate places where you delete material from a quotation. Look, for example, at how Iris Lee, in an early draft of her essay, used ellipsis marks in quoting from “The Use of Force.”

Passage from Story	Quotation with Ellipsis Marks
When finally I got the wooden spatula behind the last teeth and just the point of it into the mouth cavity, she opened up for an instant but before I could see anything she came down again and gripping the wooden blade between her molars she reduced it to splinters before I could get it out again. (Williams, par. 29)	In describing his attempts to get the wooden spatula into the girl’s mouth, the narrator says “she opened up for an instant but . . . came down again and gripping the wooden blade between her molars reduced it to splinters . . .”

The Problem Failing to use ellipsis marks to indicate the omission of material misrepresents the quote, which is a serious breach of convention. Using ellipsis marks incorrectly makes your readers doubt your knowledge of conventions.

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The Correction If you are using MLA style, follow these rules about using ellipsis marks:

When you delete words from the middle of a quoted sentence, add ellipsis marks, and leave a single space before and after each ellipsis point.
When you delete words from the end of a quoted sentence and a grammatically complete sentence remains, add a period after the last word and then three ellipsis marks.
Leave a single space after the period and each of the first two ellipsis marks. Do not leave a space between the last mark and the closing quotation mark.
When you delete material from the middle of a passage of two or more sentences, use ellipsis marks where the text is omitted and a period after the preceding text if it is a grammatically complete sentence.
When you delete words from the beginning of a quoted sentence, use ellipsis marks only if the remainder of the sentence begins with a capitalized word and is a grammatically complete sentence.
Single words and brief phrases can be quoted without ellipsis marks.

For more on using ellipsis marks to indicate a deletion from a quotation, see Chapter 23.

Examples of sentences edited to show correct usage follow:

The narrator describes his patient as an unusually attractive little thing, and as strong as a heifer in appearance. She had magnificent blonde hair, in profusion.”
According to the narrator, the little girl’s mother was “a big startled-looking who merely said, Is this the doctor? and let me in.”