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Ensure your paper meets all requirements and guidelines. Learn about major and minor edits, focus, organization, and developing topics for a polished final submission.
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A Writing Center Workshop Finishing Touches
Do You Meet The Assignment Guidelines? • Double check your rubric, and the instructions provided by your professor before you begin editing. • Do you meet all the requirements? • Are all the necessary topics addressed and supported? • Is there anything else that needs to be added, or supported?
Major and Minor Edits • Before you begin the final editing process for your paper, make sure your paper contains the following: • A well-developed focus (thesis) statement. • Organized and developed ideas and concepts that expand on your focus statement. • Logical transitions between ideas. • Proper support for your ideas • A properly cited references page.
Major Edits • Major structural edits may be necessary for some portions of your paper. To decide if you need to make major edits, ask the following of your paper: • Is there a central focus, or purpose to my paper? • Is my paper organized? • Are my subtopics properly supported? • If you answered no to any of the above, you may need to make some major edits.
Honing Your Focus • If you have questions on focus, the following questions may help. • What is it that your paper is trying to say? • What is my goal, my purpose for writing this paper? • What is the central issue at stake, and what are you trying to prove, or disprove?
Editing Your Organization • Organization is key to an effective paper. To make sure your paper is well organized the following questions may help. • Does your paper make logical transitions? • Is there some relation between the topics in your paper? • Are all the like ideas grouped together in your paper?
Developing Your Topics • In addition to having a strong focus, it is also critical to properly develop your subtopics. • Have your provided all the information necessary to make a strong argument? • Have you addressed possible counterpoints to your argument? • Are all your subtopics working together to support your primary claim?
Minor EditsProof-Reading Your Paper • Try reading your paper backwards from the last sentence to the first. • Reading it this way allows you to take each line out of context, and really focus in on errors at the sentence level. • Proof-reading serves the purpose of making sure your paper makes sense at the sentence level and in terms of spelling, and grammar.
Minor EditsDocumentation Style • Is your paper properly formatted in the style assigned by your instructor? Typically MLA or APA style. • For concerns with documentation style, it is best to review the sample paper. • Prior to beginning a paper, it may be best to also make use of the paper templates available on the Writing Center’s web site.