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Let's say you sent in the first draft of a paper and it was returned with
a few marks asking for clarification or reorganization or maybe even grammar
corrections. Now what? After all, it looked clear and well organized and
grammatical when you reread it before sending it in, so how are you supposed
to fix it? Yup, that's always a problem. Let me suggest two techniques for
rereading, rewriting, and reorganizing your work. The first one can usually
be done in about 20 minutes and often helps writers look at their papers
from a different perspective.
Technique One: 1) Single space your paper. 2) If you're a word processing wizard, use Replace so that each sentence is triple spaced and starts on a new line. If you aren't such a wiz, do this manually by clicking to the end of each sentence and hitting the ENTER key three times. 3) Each sentence is now clearly separated from the others; go ahead and print your paper. 4) Cut it up so each sentence is separated. 5) Mix up the sentences so the original order is not obvious, and take a coffee break. 6) Now, rearrange the sentences into natural, orderly ideas or topics or paragraphs. 7) After the sentences are rearranged in the cut up version, apply these changes using your word processor. You will probably find sentences that don't seem to easily fit with others, and finding such sentences is one of the purposes of this revising/reorganizing technique; don't force sentences to fit in places where they don't easily, naturally, logically belong. This is not a jigsaw puzzle where every single piece is needed. It's a paper with unnecessary sentences, or sentences that need further development, support, and organization. Don't be married to these sentences; get rid of the ones that are redundant or unnecessary, and write new sentences to support the ones that are needed by. Feel free to reorganize, add, delete. If someone else is around, print an extra copy and ask him or her to reorganize the sentences. This can be fun, and more important it can help you see alternative ways of reading and writing your paper. It's very, very difficult to reorganize a paper on a monitor because the whole paper is not visible and the working memory can't maintain accurate accounts of the entire paper. It's also difficult to reorganize a printed paper, although it can be easier if the individual paragraphs are separated, cut up, and reorganized. This is a technique that can help reorganize other papers in the future. Next is a slightly different technique that is most useful in longer papers, especially the 10+ pagers you'll write for many courses at SNL. Technique Two 1) Reset the margins of your paper so you have about 3 inches on the right hand side. 2) Print it and write the main idea or key words or purpose of each paragraph in the margin. 3) Use these written notes to construct an outline of your paper on the word processor, and even try to use the old Roman Numeral outline system you might have learned when you were young. (Wink!) 4) Reduce the outline to a one-page document, even if you have to use a small font. The purpose of this assignment, once again, is reordering a long paper. Because working memory is inadequate for maintaining and manipulating a 10-, 20-, 60- paragraph paper, alternative techniques are needed so that the paper can be seen in its entirety and reorganized and rewritten as needed. OK, that's it for this note. I'll stick these suggestions on the Campfire page. Let me know if you try these techniques. Students in my meat classes (as opposed to non-meat cyberspace classes) always try both techniques and almost always come up with alternative, more effective organization as well as sentences that clearly need deletion or amplification. This can also help with your grammar because you can read one sentence at a time and focus more on each one's structure. |