theguide11e

Improving the Draft: Revising, Editing, and Proofreading

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

Review comments from your classmates, instructor, or writing center tutor. What are your readers getting at?
Take another look at your notes and ideas. What else should you consider?
Review your draft. What else can you do to make your story compelling?

Revise your draft.

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If your readers are having difficulty with your draft, try some of the strategies listed in the Troubleshooting Guide below. They can help you fine-tune your presentation of the genre’s basic features.

A TROUBLESHOOTING GUIDE

Click the Troubleshooting Guide to download.

A Well-Told Story	My readers tell me that the story starts too slowly. Shorten the exposition, spread it out more within the story, or move it to a later part of the story. Move a bit of dialogue or narrative action up front. Start with something surprising but critical to the story.
	My readers find the chronology confusing. Add or change time transitions. Look for inadvertent tense shifts and fix them.
	My readers feel that the suspense slackens or that the story lacks drama. Add remembered feelings and thoughts to heighten anticipation. Add an action sequence to build to a climax or high point. Cut or shorten background exposition and unnecessary description. Build rising action in stages, with multiple high points.
	My readers find the conflict vague or unconnected to the autobiographical significance. Think about the conflict’s multiple and possibly contradictory meanings. Add remembered feelings or thoughts to suggest multiple meanings, and cut those that don’t clarify the significance. Add your present perspective to make the significance clearer and bring out the implications. Add dialogue or narrative action to clarify the conflict.

Vivid Description of People and Places	Page 51 My readers feel that the people in the story don’t come alive. Add details about distinctive physical features or mannerisms. Add speaker tags to the dialogue to characterize people and relationships. Read your dialogue aloud, and revise to make the language more natural and appropriate to the person.
	My readers have trouble visualizing the places I describe. Name objects in the scene. Add sensory details (colors, sounds, smells, textures). Use a comparison — metaphor or simile — to evoke a particular mood or attitude. Add a visual — a photograph or other memorabilia.
	My readers feel that some descriptions weaken the dominant impression. Omit unnecessary details. Add adjectives, similes, or metaphors to strengthen the dominant impression. Rethink the impression you want your writing to convey and the significance it suggests.

Autobiographical Significance	My readers do not identify or sympathize with me. Add background details or explain the context. Reveal the cultural influences acting on you or emphasize the historical period in which the event occurred. Show readers how you have changed or were affected by the experience.
	My readers don’t understand the significance of the story. Use irony or humor to contrast your present perspective with your past behavior, feelings, or attitudes. Show that the event ended but that the conflict was not resolved. Use dialogue to show how your relationship with people in your story changed. Indicate how the event continues to influence your thoughts or actions.
	My readers think the significance seems too pat or simplistic. Develop contradictions or show ambivalence to enrich the implications. Use humor to comment ironically on your past behavior or current contradictory feelings. Stress the social or cultural dimensions of the event. Revise Hollywood-movie clichés, simple resolutions, or tagged-on morals.

Edit and proofread your draft.

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Four problems commonly appear in essays about remembered events: misused words and expressions, dull word choices and flabby sentences, incorrectly punctuated or formatted dialogue, and misused past-perfect verbs. The following guidelines will help you check your essay for these common errors.

A Note on Grammar and Spelling Checkers

These tools can be helpful, but don’t 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.

Using the Right Word or Expression

The Problem Many familiar sayings and expressions are frequently heard but not often seen in writing, so writers often mistake the expression. Consider the following sentences:

Chock it up to my upbringing, but having several children play butt naked around my feet certainly curved my appetite for parenthood.

The deer was still jerking in its death throws, but for all intensive purposes it was dead.

Within those two sentences are five commonly mangled expressions. To the ear, they may sound right, but in each case the author has heard the expression incorrectly and written down the wrong words.

Note: The expressions should be chalk it up, buck naked, curbed my appetite, death throes, and for all intents and purposes.

The Correction You can find and debug these kinds of errors by following these steps:

Highlight or circle common expressions of two or more words in your writing project (especially those you’ve heard before but haven’t seen in writing).
Check each expression in a dictionary or in a list of frequently misused words.
Consider revising the expression: If you have heard the expression so often that it “sounds right,” it may be a cliché. A fresh expression will be more powerful.

Choosing Vivid Language and Cutting Flab

The Problem Early drafts often include vague or overly general word choices and flabby sentences. Cutting words that add little, making verbs active, and replacing weak word choices with stronger ones can greatly increase the power of a remembered event essay.

The Correction The following three steps can help you tighten your language and make it more powerful.

Circle empty intensifiers, such as just, very, certain, and really. Now reread each sentence, omitting the circled word. If the sentence still makes sense without the word, delete it.
Circle all forms of the verb to be (such as am, is, are, was, and were). Now reread each sentence that includes a circled word, and ask yourself, “Could I revise the sentence or combine it with another sentence to create an active construction? Examples:
- took off after Jasper, as he raced toward Third Avenue.
- oak in the front yard.
Review your descriptions, highlighting or underlining adjectives, adverbs, and prepositional phrases. Now reread them, imagining a more specific noun or verb that could convey the same idea in fewer words.
- across the parking lot.

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Resolving Dialogue Issues

The Problem Remembered event essays often include dialogue, but writers sometimes have trouble using the conventions of dialogue correctly. One common problem occurs with punctuation marks:

In American English, the opening quotation mark hugs the first word of the quotation. Commas belong inside the closing quotation mark, but end punctuation can go inside or outside the closing quotation mark, depending on whether the end punctuation belongs to the quotation or the end of the sentence.
Speaker tags reflect what the speaker was thinking, feeling, or doing.
A new paragraph is typically used to indicate a change in speaker.

The Correction Revise the punctuation, add speaker tags, or start a new paragraph as needed:

what’ going my sister
A few seconds later, my sister appeared and asked, “So, did you decide to buy the I guess not.”

Using the Past Perfect

The Problem Remembered event essays often mention events that occurred before the main action. To convey this sequence of events, writers use the past-perfect tense rather than the simple past tense:

Past Perfect	Simple Past
had traveled	traveled
had been	was
had begun	began

Failing to use the past perfect when it is needed can make your meaning unclear. (What happened when, exactly?)

The Correction Check places where you recount events to verify that you are using the past perfect to indicate actions that had already been completed at the time of another past action (she had finished her work when we saw her).

three people in the car, something my father told me not to do that very morning.
Coach Kernow told me than ever before.

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Note for Multilingual Writers It is important to remember that the past perfect is formed with had followed by a past participle. Past participles usually end in ed, d, en, n, or t— worked, hoped, eaten, taken, bent— although some are irregular (such as begun or chosen).

Before Tania went to Moscow last year, she had not