Editing Mechanics: Go through the list with Rules for Writers

Use the list below to edit different issues that arise in your drafts. You want to format and present your Portfolio essays nicely, with none of these easily fixable (VERY EASY) edits. Go through them individually in each of your essays.


1. Don't use "etc." and other Latin abbreviations (343) because they are tonally too casual.

2. Acronyms: only used widely-known acronyms. As RR notes, if you are using a less unfamiliar acronym you need to introduce the whole title first, with the acronym in parentheses.

• Bourdain studied at the Culinary Institute of America (CIA), the premier cooking school in the USA.  [See what I did there?!?}

3. Salutations can be used with proper names, when logical. 

• Unless the character goes by "Miss Sophie," you would call her Sophie--never Ms. Sophie.  However, Mrs. Rasmussen is also Anna Rasmussen--never Missus Rasmussen.

4. With numbers, the general rule is to spell out all numbers one-hundred and below. Along with rule four, you also have rule five dealing with numbers:

5. If a number starts off a sentence, write out that number. Fourteen-hundred and seventy-five is a large number, isn't it?

6. Stay numerically consistent. If you make the minor error of stating 3 out of four dentists agree, you should really be arguing that 3 out of 4 dentists agree. 

7.  As the book notes, numbers used as part of modifying phrases can be in number form, not spelled out.

• He hired an editor to get the 500-pound monkey off his back. The editor, though, was not five-hundred pounds, nor a monkey.

8. To italicize, or not to italicize, that is A question. However, you should never have to make it THE question.

•  Longer, "complete" texts such as books, albums, TV shows, movies, plays, magazines, newspapers, and even websites should be italicized. 

• However, the Bible and the Constitution are not italicized (348). Legal document titles are never italicized. 

9. Also, do not italicize (or bold, or underline) the title of your own essay. Use capitalization rules, instead.

10. Go beyond spellcheck. Use spellcheck, but don't rely on it. Spellcheck doesn't catch homonyms (there, their, there're | it it's | to two too | here hear!)

11.  Plurals versus (not verses) Possessives.  The apostrophe (') is used for ownership. You cannot tack on an -s or -es to a word to make that word own the next word. 

• What do I do with Jerry's throw [rug]? Do all Jerrys throw left-handed?

12. Capitalize proper nouns, like character names. Real people names. Business names. Titles of sources.

• There is a difference between giving Johnny cash and giving Johnny Cash away.

13. Commonly misspelled words: look for them versus assuming you have tight verses. Check 356-57 in RR, but also go to a dictionary for words you are unsure of.

14. Hyphens are not dashes. Hyphens are used with compound words, between prefixes and suffixes (360). 

15. Hyphens are also important to use when you are formatting your essay. If there is too much white space at the end of a line and you have long word, try to split that word up at a natural syllabic break to avoid the empty, or too short, line.

HW for Tuesday

1. Bring in CLEAN, REVISED AND EDITED Essays 1, 2 and Midterm. If you come to class having done nothing but what we have worked on in class, with essays that have your professor's critique all over it, then you are setting yourself up for failing the class.

Your job over this weekend is to re-write and edit those essays that you feel will help you get out of Developmental English and into credit level courses. Coming to class with essays that you have not touched, looked at, or thought much about just indicates something about where you are at in "getting it."

I have given you multiple activities and ideas for how to work on your language. The hard part is yours to work out: putting in the difficult thinking and working on your essay's language, because you must realize that what you have done so far is simply not good enough to pass a credit-level class.


Work on a few of these things, separately, daily, between now and Tuesday:

1. Adding context to your introductions. Giving proper background information and details. Who is your audience, what do they need to know about your subject? What is the purpose of the essay, and what points am I making to support and prove that purpose?

2. Edit run ons

3. Edit comma errors

4. Edit your sentences for concision

5. Edit fragments

6. Edit mechanics

7. Edit agreement issues: subject verb, tense, point of view

8. Content revision/addition: Work on adding details and descriptions to examples

9. Work on Emphasizing Key Ideas with coordination and subordination

10. Edit concision of sentences.

11. Get a dictionary out, a thesaurus, and build up your individual essay word banks. Work on going through essays, identifying repeated words and phrases, and work on new forms of expressions--synonyms!

Revising Essays To Emphasize Key Ideas

Open up the hood to your essays and look at the language engine. How strong are your main ideas, how much coordination and subordination and paralleling and ordering have you taken to your main points? No matter. Even if you have spent a lot of time on those ideas, you can spend a bit more time going through your essays and looking for places to reorder and rewrite sentences to make sure your ideas are EMPHASIZED.

1. Do one of two strategies for your already revised essays:

• Bold all of your most important sentences, the thesis claim and topic sentences. 

• OR, sketch outline those same sentences on a clean sheet of paper, with space in between each sentence so that you can work on writing the sentence over using different techniques.

2. Look at concision once again, after revising the sentences. Again, the biggest thing that different strategies do is making us continuously inspect our language and try to better what we've already written--in content and in grammar.

Editing: Parallels and How They Work For Us When We Get Them To Work

Parallel Structure (Rules for Writers, 116-119)

As the OWL website clarifies, a parallelism is when you have a list or multiple ideas that are presented in the same pattern, same basic syntactical structure.

Here are a few things to consider about your sentences that have lists (or could use a list) or that present multiple ideas:

• verb forms should match (especially in a list)
• clauses should have matching word patterns
• correlative expressions also need to be edited (check the link)

Furthermore, Towson University up in Baltimore has a great breakdown for how to identify and work on parallel structure. 

How can knowing and working on parallel structure help me out?!?

• A strong parallel made within a thesis statement can outline your entire essay body.

• Besides using the structure for thesis statements, the technique is good to use for:

•  outlining multiple reasons or examples within a body paragraph
• reiterating in a conclusion the points made in an essay (especially if you didn't use the same structure in the introduction/thesis)

• Example 1: Being an effective boss includes keeping cool and  solving in-house problems when there are issues between employees.

• Example 2: One's spirituality can be defined through religious beliefs, expressed through artistic views, and nurtured through daily interactions.

• Notice how the verbs match in form, and the objects have the same pattern

• Example 3: Grams' favorite arugula farro rissto can be made in three easy stages: dicing up the tomato and herbs, cooking the farro down in broth, and adding arugula and lemon mixture before serving.  (Each of these stages has steps within to cover, and each stage represents a body paragraph.)

Grammar Aside, How Does Effective Parallelism Impact My Writing?

• You can organize your main idea(s) in a sentence list that gives you directions for each paragraph to follow. Organization!!!

• You can order ideas in a list that emphasizes a certain priority to the list. Which idea is most important or strongest?

• As RR shows in Chapter 14, when you order sentences and you order parallel actions/images, that order impacts understanding. 

"If" and When We Take the Final

For your final, you are going to write an essay centered around the Rudyard Kipling Poem "If--." Over the next few classes, we will break the poem down from different angles, looking at different poetry elements, as well as discussing the applicable actions and themes presented in the poem.


 Before I go through elements with you, let's read "Reading Poems: 20 Strategies" as class.

Layers of Poetry | Word Choice

1. Denotation: the dictionary meaning a word holds; its surface meaning

2. Connotation: extra meaning a word carries, or “suggests”; the meaning may be cultural, thematically related to rest of poem’s content. Also, a word or phrase may depend on reader understanding alternate meanings in dictionary, sound-relations to other words (insure/ensure), context of usage, & other credible connections of the words to the rest of the text. 

• Writers use many figures of speech: they rely on a reader getting (or working to understand) the connotative values of their word choice.   (Look these terms up for further comprehension!)

• Imagery: visual thing, concrete, like a picture or sculpture--you can see thing being described (whether in action or stationary). Images can be literally within the poem or the speaker's own figure of speech (see this definition)
• 
  
• Symbol: an image that is both the literal and figurative thing.
• An eagle in a poem is an eagle, but its usage may also represent other things, like 
• 
  
• Idiom: an expression whose meaning doesn't logically apply to its parts of speech, but has come to have a particular usage.

• "not predictable from the usual meanings of its constituent elements, as kick the bucket or hangone's head, or from the general grammatical rules of a language, asthe table round for the round table, and that is not a constituent of a larger expression of like characteristics." (Dictionary.com)

• Personification: giving human qualities to non-human things, such as animals or inanimate objects.
• 
  
• Allusions: words in a piece that refer to people, places, historical events, literary works, works of art, etc.  For instance, what may a "bald eagle" refer to?
• 
  
• Metaphor: comparing a thing to another thing that it is normally unassociated with. Key to seeing: "____ is ______."
• 
  
• Similes: comparing specific qualities of a thing to an unlike thing, using "like" or "as."

• Hyperbole: a gross exaggeration to make a point (see "To His Coy Mistress").
• 
  
• & many more
• 
  

3. Precision versus Accuracy: Why a Write Chooses Words From Synonyms

• Accurate word=meets denotative meaning
• Precise word= connotations, and also situational à slice: knife, not slice: ax    (If word doesn’t fit the situation in a published piece – we should look into why they’ve used an imprecise word.)

• Writers, especially many poets, seek out the best word possible, based on a word’s accuracy and precision. 
• *Precision may also be based off of rhyme scheme, too. 
• Or off of other sound qualities, which we will cover next week. 

HW for Thursday, 11/6

Read Chapter 14 of Rules for Writers. Read and answer, too, the Breaking Down Metaphor handout available in the files section of our MyMC course page. 

Continue working on your concision issues in your Essays 1, 2 and Midterm. 

Editing: Working on Concision & Emphasizing Idea

Go through your Midterm Essay--and if you don't have it, then choose one of your other Essays 1, 2 or, as a last resort, 3--and work on improving each sentence with:

1. Concise in phrases and words (cutting out wordiness)

2. Most effective ordering of ideas (coordination and subordination)


This means you better:

1. Start with one paragraph. Separate each sentence from its paragraph form. List them like lines in a poem:

Sentence one on its own line

Sentence two on its own line

Sentence three on its own line

2. Use the concision handout to look for different wordiness issues.

3. Additionally, after fixing each sentence separately, work on combining sentences IF two sentences are in need of a clearer relationship.

• Use the coordination and subordination techniques/fixing run-on techniques. Chapter 14 in Rules for Writers demonstrates ways for reorganizing sentences to emphasize key eyes, which further helps with concision.