Finishing Touches

In this lesson, you have seen many strategies for revising sentences and for revising paragraphs. Not every strategy is appropriate for every essay. You must think about your audience and your purpose when selecting revision strategies. And, of course, you cannot include every strategy in any one essay. You might, however, challenge yourself each time you write an essay to try a new strategy—perhaps one for sentences and one for words.

“The Editing and Revising Process” is a great website for you to bookmark and use as you put the finishing touches on an essay. The site contains many strategies for polishing your essay.

As you are reading the advice for editing and revising, you will be able to click on topics such as “The Notorious Confusables,” “Plurals,” “Run-on Sentences,” “Passive Verbs,” or other aspects of style. At the bottom of the page, you will find the “Editing Checklist,” a table linked to explanations of elements of organization and development (for example, thesis statement, logic, introduction, and conclusion), style (tone), and “personal grammatical issues” (ranging from fragments to wordiness). When you click on “Beginnings,” for example, you receive a list of “Things NOT to do in an introductory paragraph.”

Review the website for “The Editing Process” now.