Revising and refining your research paper

Revising: Begin by strengthening global issues in your first draft- the quality and clarity of your ideas and your support for those ideas: the organization or line of reasoning in your draft; and the overall tone or voice. At this stage, you cut, condense, expand, and add material. By addressing these whole-paper issues first, you can edit and proofread more efficiently later. After all, what’s the point of carefully editing a passage for style and grammar when in the end, you cut the passage?

Editing: Once you are fairly confident about the global traits of ideas, organization, and voice, begin strengthening sentence style and word choice. At this stage, your aim is to make your writing clear, concise, energetic, and varied, Because your attention is focused more locally or microscopically on your writing, you can also fix obvious errors, though that task is really the focus of the next phase, proofreading.

Proofreading: This phase focuses on correctness-accuracy of information and research references; and correct grammar, punctuation, mechanics, usage, and spelling. At this stage, your goal is to make your already edited writing clean.

Global issues --- ideas, paper’s organization, and voice of the paper

Local issues—title, transitions, spelling, grammar, punctuation, mechanics errors

Test the strength of your essential thinking

To get a sense of how well your overall thinking works, highlight your initial thesis statement and your restatement of the thesis in your conclusion, Then also highlight the main points along the way from thesis statement A to thesis statement B: these points are likely featured in your paragraphs’ topic sentences. Do the thesis statements relate to each other? Is the line of reasoning from A to B solid, or are there weak links that need repair?

Test the balance of reasoning and support

Examine the big picture of how you have used source material in relation to your own discussion of the issue. Highlight all source material in your draft and weigh that material against your own thinking. If your draft includes claim that lack needed support you need to either scale back the claims or add information and evidence.

Conversely, your draft may be dominated by source material, not your own thinking. If your paper reads like a series of source summaries or loosely stitched together quotations, if it contains big patches of copy-and paste material, if your paragraphs all seem to start and end with source material, or if your is dense with detailed but almost incomprehensible data, deepen your own contribution to the paper by trying the following

1. Expand your discussion.

2. Elaborate the evidence.

3. Clarify the significance