How I Develop My Own Papers

While I have always been bad about the prewriting steps I have been a big fan of rough drafts and peer reviews. After I had gotten out of my high school days of not really applying myself enough to care what the grade was, most of the papers or really anything I would write I always re-read to go over it and do some revisions. After that I would give them to one of a few people who’s opinion writing I thought well of and have them look it over.

If I allowed myself the correct amount of time when I was writing a paper I would set it aside once I had finished writing the whole thing for a day or so, an hour or so if I had procrastinated for too long, and reread it. This would allow me to get some of the immediate preconceptions of what I was saying while I was in the thick of it to seep away and try to look at it a little more objectively. When I was reading again there were a few things I was looking for; first spelling and grammatical errors. In this age of F7 or spell check it was not as much looking for incorrectly spelled words but wrong versions of words or flat wrong words that had inadvertently been introduced by lavish use of these tools. After that I would look for sentences I found myself re-reading. I read quite a bit and as a result I have developed an ability to recognize something that does not flow well (it is not a perfect skill), as a result if I found myself rereading something it was likely because it had interrupted the line of thought in such a way that I could not continue. So I would rewrite the line until it would flow.

The final thing I would do is send it off to a friend who would then mark it up for me. Catch any other issues I had missed in the previous section but more importantly give me an outside point of view that does not have all of the context rolling around in their head. They could point of if something I had said was not well enough developed or an idea should be explored further to better help the reader understand what was going on. In addition to this they could tell me where I was getting a bit long winded and to wind up a particular thought or remove it entirely.