instructor: Jentery Sayers 
~ classroom: smi 309 
& ougl 101 ~ TTh: 9:30-11:20
How-To Guide for Revising Your English 121 Papers
Step One: Review the Course Outcomes and contact me with what questions you have.
Step Two: Review the prompts for each assignment . For each, what outcomes are targeted?
Step Three: Re-read your paper with my comments, together with the corresponding letter from me. Also review any comments your peers made. Then write your own comments in response, as if in conversation with me and your peers.
- What do we stress?
- As your readers, what about your paper is unclear to us?
- And in relation to the targeted outcomes, what do we think needs development and articulation?
Contact me and/or your peers with what questions you have.
Step Four: Begin revising your papers in relation to the targeted outcomes. Work from the big to the small concerns. (Typically speaking, I address the big issues in my letter to you.) Review the "Questions for Writers" info sheet and then revise your paper in the following order:
- Content: Address substantive issues (e.g., claims, evidence, and intertextualization). Add what you need and remove what is not essential. When in doubt, cut it out.
- Rhetorical Appeals: Consider your warrants and your appeals to your audience. Think as your audience would think and revise what might not be interpreted as you intended. Too, determine whether your rhetorical strategies (including your logic, register, and sources of evidence) match the conventions of the writing genre.
- Structure: Review all organizational issues (e.g., introduction, conclusion, and line of inquiry). Analyze your paper’s organization and its parts and determine what could be clarified. Focus your paper by tying things together with collocation sets and transitions .
- Format: Be sure that your paper meets the page-length requirement and is in accordance with the MLA system of documentation .
- Sentences: Examine the length, complexity, structure, and style in relation to your paper’s clarity, flow, and effectiveness. Consider conjunctions .
- Diction: Edit your paper so that its word choice, jargon, and tone fit the expectations of its writing genre.
Step Five: Spell-check the thing.
Step Six: Read your paper aloud and revise the parts where your reading stumbles or slows down.
Step Seven: Read your paper backwards as best you can. Then, you will focus on the words, not the content. Look especially for repetitions and vague words.
Step Eight: Get help online , at a writing center , and/or from me (during my (virtual) office hours , by e-mail , or by appointment).
uw english | jentery at u.washington.edu
