 Hi, this is Jeff Perdue with Western Libraries. In this video, I'll be covering the Hackroll Research and Writing Studio's tips for revising and editing your papers. When we talk about revising, editing, and proofreading, it's important to note that these three words describe very different activities that happen at different stages of writing a paper. Revision means what its name implies, to look at your paper in a different way. Proofreading and editing both refer to finding and fixing errors in your writing, with editing encompassing a focus on style, grammar, and other concerns. It's important to work on revision before turning to editing and proofreading. You want to make sure that your ideas are fully developed, coherent, and well arranged before spending time on stylistic issues and fixing mistakes. So let's take revising first. Your paper likely started with a research or inquiry question. This overall question generated more specific and focused sub-questions that both drove your research and helped you structure your paper. After having drafted your paper, or at least some of it, and incorporated your research, it's time to look over it again to see if you've brought forward all the ideas you intended and that the paper has an appropriate organization. You may have seen this graphic in previous workshops or online resources. The central bubble is meant to represent your overall research or inquiry question. The additional bubbles represent sub-questions. Your research is an attempt to answer each sub-question as a way to answer your central inquiry question. Finally, the smallest dots represent sources that you have found that partially answer each sub-question, and we'll talk more later about the role of sources in your paper structure when we talk about rhetorical moves. Although we talk about inquiry questions and sub-questions, as you write your paper, the inquiry question becomes the central thesis of your paper, while the sub-questions become different claims supporting the thesis. After having drafted your paper, or most of it, you'll want to take a step back to look at the structure of it. There are a few different ways we can go about this. Experiment with these techniques to see which ones work best for your own process. The first technique is to map out your ideas without looking at your draft. Write down your main claim or central thesis, or then answer your central inquiry question. Then write out your sub-claims that address various aspects implicated by your thesis, or then answer the themes suggested by your sub-questions. Then indicate what sources go with each sub-claim, or then answer specific sub-questions. It would also be good to indicate the rhetorical move, or moves used for each source, and again, we'll cover rhetorical moves in just a moment, so hang on to that thought. As you're mapping out your ideas, it can be useful to think about what functions each section of your paper is served, rather than on what you're saying. In other words, what functions are served by your introduction? Are these the functions that you need your introduction to accomplish? Is each paragraph or each section doing the job you needed to be doing in that part of the paper? This revision activity may lead you to rewrite parts of your paper, or even to write new paragraphs. While there's no such thing as a real formula for writing, and any formula-based approach would lead to a really boring paper, this template may assist you in drafting paragraphs with sources if you're feeling stuck. After mapping out your ideas, you can create an idea path showing how each sub-claim connects to the others, and being specific about what the connection is can be useful. You can also try out moving sub-claims around to see if a different idea path works better. Comparing this idea path to your original map that you created without looking at your draft is another way to get a different perspective on what you've written. Another technique is using summarizing techniques for your draft. This is sometimes called a reverse outline because you created after having written your paper. This slide shows one approach to this, focused on articulating the main point of a paragraph and its purpose or function, as well as any questions you might have about it. Another approach is to create a one-sentence summary of each paragraph, either in the margins or in a separate sheet of paper. This can allow you to see if any paragraph should be reshuffled. But perhaps even more powerfully, this technique can help you see if you have any missing paragraphs or unneeded paragraphs that don't support your thesis. Showing your summary sentences to another person can be especially helpful. Ideally, another reader should be able to understand the flow of your ideas just by reading your one-sentence summaries. If something is confusing to them, you may want to examine whether you have any gaps in how your ideas were organized. As part of the process of mapping out your thoughts and reconsidering how you structure your ideas, reflecting on how you're using sources is an important part of the revision process. In our discussion of using sources, we'll be emphasizing a concept known as rhetorical moves. Although there are many possible rhetorical moves that we can identify, we'll be focusing on three main categories, grounding moves, extending or forwarding moves, and countering moves. When you first started to incorporate sources in your writing in early research-based writing, you're probably focused on grounding moves. We often turn to sources to authorize a claim that we have made, or to define a concept, or to illustrate a point. As such, you're probably familiar with grounding moves, and they remain important ways to use sources in your writing. Another set of rhetorical moves have to do with extending or forwarding the insights or techniques in a scholarly source. Borrowing and extending moves involve repurposing an argument from a source and applying it in a fresh context or in ways not intended in the cited source. Synthesizing moves involve taking two or more sources and bringing them together in an original way. Literature reviews are an important example of synthesizing sources, but it's an important part of other types of scholarly writing as well. Countering moves involve pointing out places where a scholar's argument falls short, or uncovering gaps or hidden biases in their thinking, or simply arguing against their conclusions. This can happen within the context of synthesizing or other rhetorical moves, and in fact, you will often be using more than one rhetorical move with a given source. Now, when you look at your idea map or summary of your paper, go through each section and specify which sources you use for that section and the rhetorical move or moves that you use to bring that source into your paper. All of those should point back to your thesis statement. All of the sources and the sections of your paper that they belong to are in service to the argument you are making to demonstrate your thesis. If you think back to the bubble map of your thesis and your sub-claims, you should be able to identify which sources go with which bubbles, and the arrows should specify which rhetorical move is being used in that instance. All of this work on examining your paper structure and how the argument is laid out and how sources function in your paper may lead you to rethink your thesis. This is a good thing to do at this stage. Sometimes in writing a paper, your thesis will shift without you realizing it. You'll end up answering a slightly different question to the one you initially posed, or you may simply realize that your thesis can be stated in a stronger form. In any case, after the work we've described, you should revisit your thesis and see if it matches the structure of your paper as you've revised it. This list of the qualities of a strong thesis may help you revise your thesis so that it's clear, is arguable, and matches the rest of your paper. It would be a good idea to shell your revised thesis to someone and ask them what they might expect a paper with this thesis to look like and what sorts of questions they would like to see answered. After revising your paper and possibly your thesis, it's time to review your paper for style. Academic style is something that can be different from discipline to discipline. A scholarly journal article in psychology will have a different style than one in history. However, there are some generalizations we can make. First of all, make sure to use written and not spoken language. You should not have a tone that is too casual, but neither should you try to sound too fancy. You should write like yourself. You should use the fewest words possible that allow you to fully express your ideas. Coherence and concision are always important. And except in certain situations, you should avoid using passive voice. This slide shows a couple of simple examples on how passive constructions can be rewritten to use active voice. Active voice results in sentences that are more direct and are clearer. Make sure you check with your professor for other stylistic conventions that you should be aware of for the paper that you're writing. After revising your paper's ideas and style, it's time to do some final proofreading and editing. There are a few different things you should be looking for. Errors may be hard to spot, since these may reflect a convention of grammar or spelling that you're not aware of. This is where getting another reader can be helpful. Another reader can help you spot patterns that show up in your writing. Everybody makes mistakes in their writing, and I'll try to suggest some ways you can spot those. Lastly, you should also be aware of stylistic errors. These may not be incorrect in terms of grammar, but are things that go against the stylistic conventions of a particular discipline or form of writing. The next two slides give 10 proofreading strategies that can help you spot all three of these kinds of errors or mistakes. First and foremost, make sure that you finish revising. You don't want to go through and fix mistakes for something that will be rewritten anyway. Prioritizing errors can be useful. Go through your paper once looking for the most important mistakes, particularly those that may have been identified by your professor, or things that make your meaning difficult to understand. Two of the most important techniques for proofreading are to read your paper out loud and to read it backwards. Reading out loud can be especially effective in helping you identify where your writing is choppy or where you'll want to revise the style. Reading backwards may seem strange, but it's probably the best way to spot mistakes. When we read from meaning, we tend not to notice mistakes since we're focused on the flow of the writing and making sense of the argument. But if you read the last sentence first and then the next last sentence and so on, you're reading less from meaning and can more easily spot misspellings and easy grammar and punctuation mistakes. These other strategies can also be effective, especially getting another reader. But it's also important to take a break and to get active. This can help you clear your brain and come to your paper with a fresher perspective. As part of proofreading and editing, make sure to leave time for looking at your citations and how you're documenting sources. Of course, one of the most important reasons to cite your sources properly is to avoid plagiarism, but citations go well beyond this. The entire system of scholarly communication depends upon scholars giving credit to which ideas they're using in their writing and where those ideas came from. Allowing the reader to go back to the original source that you have cited in your paper is an important part of the process. And following the trade-off citations from source to source is a vital part of how ideas are communicated. To do this, you need to make sure that you are acknowledging your sources within the text of your paper, as well as providing a complete list of citations in the bibliography or reference list. There are several different citation styles in common use. Find out which style is being used in your class and make sure you follow that style precisely. The different citation styles will all convey the same basic information, but they will differ in how that information is presented. Here are a few examples from the three major citation styles of how to cite a text within the body of your paper. And here are examples of how these will look in your bibliography or reference list. You can find a lot of helpful information on citation styles online. The resources on the Purdue University Online Writing Lab or Purdue OWL are especially good. And while it's fine to use a citation generator, you need to proofread what comes out of those. Mistakes are not uncommon. Finally, you will want to mix up how you go about revising and editing your paper. It's important to spend some time on your own doing the careful work of looking at your paper structure and how your ideas are organized. But you will also need to show your paper to others in the way suggested here or in other ways so that you can get other perspectives on how your writing is communicating to other readers. During a busy quarter, it can be difficult to set aside time to do a thorough revision. However, planning ahead so that you have time to revise and edit will result in a much stronger paper. One great way to get some feedback on your paper is to visit the Hackroll Research and Writing Studio where you can chat with someone or go into a Zoom breakout room. You can also send us a draft. Good luck with your writing and revision.