practice

A Little Practice with Electronic Editing/Drafting. Before you start trying to upload your rough drafts for some peer-review on the discussion board, I thought it would be good to do a small exercise in electronic editing and start thinking about the drafting process. Here’s what to do:

1. Open Word or the word-processing software/app that you use. 
   ►Word probably works best for this, but if you have a different word-processing program (like Open Office or Pages), then that’s what you should use.
2. Copy one of your own discussion postings from the past weeks into a document. Look to see if you have editing tools like Track Changes and Insert Comment. In Word 2010, they’re in the review tab. In Word 2003-07, they’re in the Tools menu.
   ►If you can’t find them, then use “Help” and type something like “comments” or “track changes” into the search box.)
3. Next, turn track changes on and begin editing your old discussion posting. Try inserting a comment or two about a way to improve what you wrote. 
   ►If you can’t get track changes to work, then try using the old-fashioned method of commenting on someone else’s writing: [Write your comments in a different color to make them stand out, and put them in square [] or squiggly {} brackets to make them stand out even more in case the different color isn’t discernable as a different color.]
4. Then, save your file, naming it something distinct like “Julia’s editing test.” If you’re in something other than Word, save your file as a Word document or in RTF format (rich text format). This is so others in the class will be able to open your file.
5. Return to this discussion board and write a little on your experience. (This is also a good time to ask questions about the process.) Relate it to the discussion in LB about revising and editing.
6. Finally, attach your document to the discussion posting. You can do this by clicking on the button on the right-hand side, just below the box where you type your posting.  From there, search your computer for your file, and post.

  
Source of paperclip image:freevectorfinder.com 

15 points possible

• 6 points for practicing editing your old posting and posting it as an attachment on the discussion board
• 5 points for relating your process to the discussion in LB about revising and editing; this could also include questions that came up for you as you tried editing electronically
• and 4 points for responding to someone else (whether answering a question or otherwise helpfully responding).