So you've been drafting your Rhetorical Analysis essay and received some initial feedback on it. For this short activity, you'll complete a short editing & proofreading activity, meant to help you polish up your essay for final submission.
To begin,
Reviewthe articleEdit and Proofread your College Essayby ThoughtCo. Don't worry, you don't have to work through all the steps right now! But they're good guidelines for your last bits of clean-up before you submit your essay. What you'll focus on right now isStep Six: Reading Your Essay Aloud. And by mean aloud, yes--that's what we mean.
If you're in a busy place, find a spot where you can at leastwhisperto yourself, and read what you have done so far. When you find yourself stumble, lose track of what you were saying/reading, or find something that doesn't sound right, pause and look back on the sentence that you just read. What caused you to stop? Or, you might recognize other grammatical or punctuation errors as you read.
Write down the sentence (or copy and paste it in a new document) where you stumbled or found an error and keep reading. When you're done reading over your essay, look at each sentence you wrote down.
Reflect: do you see any patterns, such as run-on sentences, sentence fragments, or comma splices? If so, focus on those sentences alone.
Next, follow this 2 step process for three of the errors you found:
- Identify the error (if possible).
- Write out the corrected sentence.
By focusing on specific errors and correcting them, it is possible to internalize the correct grammatical patterns. The more corrections you do, the faster you will improve. You may handwrite and photograph your correction log or type and upload your corrections here.
Examples:
- Original sentence:Several employees arrived late to work, their boss threatened to dock their pay.
- Error:comma splice
- Correction:Several employees arrived late to work, so their boss threatened to dock their pay.
- Original sentence:The library stay open late on weeknights.
- Error:Subject/Verb agreement
- Correction:The library stays open late on weeknights.
- Original sentence:When temperatures reach above normal highs or lows. We tend to use more power.
- Error:Fragment
- Correction:When temperatures reach above normal highs or lows, we tend to use more power.
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