Approaching Final Drafts

You may do more than two drafts to get to this final draft, but at some point the paper is due and you will have to turn it in to be evaluated for a grade. It is time to publish! What had been only dress rehearsals now will be presented live in front of an audience. The pressure is on to make your paper as perfect as you can.

Your earlier work from brainstorming through the first two drafts hopefully has brought you to the place where your ideas and content in the essay are in good shape; thus, the focus for the final draft is on careful editing and proofreading. I encourage you, however, as you turn to improve your Development Draft, not to jump straight to editing and fixing errors and think you are revising your final draft. You may be anxious to finish the paper or feel that it is all done, but this final draft presents many opportunities to improve your paper substantially. Rather than doing a quick read through of your draft for the Final Draft, I recommend you follow the phases of revision to review and change global concerns first before addressing local concerns of fixing sentences and grammar.

Addressing Global Concerns First
Run through your draft one more time, evaluating it following these items:

• Review the writing assignment sheet and its requirements and criteria for evaluation to see if you are meeting the task and its requirements successfully or not. Hopefully, your professor has provided an evaluation rubric. Study this rubric and self-evaluate your paper using it to find areas you may need to improve.
• Review the feedback you received from your peers to see what suggestions for improvement you agree are needed.
• Look closely at your thesis to see how well it expresses in compact form the overall point and meaning of your paper.
• Examine the structure of your paragraphing in the Body of the paper to see if it establishes a clear line of argument or support. Is your organization of your paper structured around clear Primary Supports for your thesis?
• Check the support within your paragraphs for adequacy (do you have enough?) and relevance (does it clearly work to back your claim?).
• Check the cohesion and coherence of your ideas, both between Primary Supports (Body paragraphs) and Secondary Supports (within Body paragraphs). Have you created clear signposts within your paper to help your reader follow your ideas?
  
  IMPORTANT: Make the above changes to your content before starting to address local concerns like your grammar.
  
  

Addressing Local Concerns Last
This last step of reviewing your paper sentence by sentence, word by word, is extremely important. The benefits of splitting your attention between global and local concerns when revising for the final draft is that when you finally get to this close review of correct language use in your paper you won't have to worry about the content--it should be in pretty good shape. You can focus on your grammar and phrasing and word choice.

Also, I strongly suggest that you PRINT a copy of your paper to do this editing. Not only will you be able to cut, move, and add text more easily on a print copy, but you will see your writing more objectively when it is in print. As you do this final review of your paper for correctness, I urge that you follow this sequence. Consider that each one requires a separate run-through of your paper with its own emphasis:

First EDIT sentences for readability

• Edit your sentences for clarity and conciseness using the Paramedic Method and Principles for Revising Sentences found in the Revising Sentences Guide.
• Review for awkward or unclear phrasing and word choice. Try reading problem sentences aloud to hear how they sound.
• Edit next for conciseness--see where you can trim out wordy and redundant phrasing.

Next EDIT sentences for grammatical correctness

• Check closely for any and all grammar errors, especially ones you know you have a tendency to make.
• Check particularly for punctuation errors and any sentence boundary errors.
• Run through this editing checklist of items in your paper. ext
• Use the set of Standard Editing Marks as you mark changes on the print copy of your draft.

When you are finished editing your paper closely, make these changes in your final version of your paper. You should see some vast improvement in terms of sharpness and correctness in your paper!

Next FINALIZE YOUR FORMATTING AND DOCUMENTATION by including proper in-text citations and creating the Works Cited page

• Put your paper in the proper manuscript format whether for MLA or APA. Generally, this involves double-spacing your paper, indenting to form paragraphs, and including a heading and pagination.
• Use your handbook or a web resource like the Purdue Online Writing Lab to help you: MLA | APA
• Use these quick guides for the basics of MLA and APA Documentation.
• Use a tool like Citation Machine or EasyBib to help your create a correctly formatted Works Cited or Reference Page.

 

Lastly Proofread
Wait--You are NOT DONE YET!

By now you may feel some excitement and sense of accomplishment (or perhaps exhaustion) at seeing your paper in its complete and polished form. You are ready to turn it in! But wait! Just as a carpenter learns the old adage "measure twice and cut once," so too you should learn to follow the practice of doing a last proofread of your paper. This last double-check of your paper is crucial because we all make small mistakes or overlook things.

This final review of your paper is equivalent to combing your hair and tucking in your shirt before you go out, or to picking up the clutter in your living room before guests arrive. Your reader is like your guest who you are inviting into your essay, and you want to present as correct, clean, and carefully crafted a text as you possibly can. This attention to final correctness shows you care about your reader.

Below are recommended steps in proofreading your paper:

• Perform a spell check on your paper.
• Review the red and green squiggly lines underlining text in your paper on the computer to spot potential errors. Use your good judgment in fixing these errors because the word processor is no always correct in what it notices or suggests.
• Print your paper and read this print copy, reviewing it closely for any errors like a missing apostrophe or incorrect capitalization. Studies have shown we see errors better from a print version of our paper.
• Try the following additional proofreading strategies to help you recognize errors to fix:
  • Read your paper aloud (or at least portions that seem rough).
  • Read your paper backwards paragraph by paragraph from end to beginning. This backward reading will help you not become absorbed in the content and flow of your paper and help you focus on just the words and text.
  • Get someone else to read over your paper to see any errors. Ask them only to circle where they see something they think is not right.

When you have completed proofreading your paper and marking any corrections, go back to your final copy in your computer and input these last changes. Save your changes.

Now, finally, after a long recursive process, you have arrived at a final draft you can be proud of as you turn it in.

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