English essay about poem

First Draft Revision Checklist

*DO THESE THINGS BEFORE YOU SUBMIT YOUR ESSAY ON TURNITIN.COM

1. Re-read your entire paper aloud to yourself. This will help you hear when sentences are incorrect or awkward, which makes your essay unclear. Proofread it again for errors.

2. As you proofread for errors, revise all comma splices, run-on sentences, and sentence fragments. Be sure that you don’t write like you talk.

3. Identify your thesis. Make sure that it is specific enough and making a critical argument. Does it express the point you are trying to prove in your paper? Revise the thesis for specificity.

4. Identify your topic sentences in your body paragraphs. Make sure that they explicitly relate to your thesis. Use keywords from your introduction to link all of your body paragraphs to your thesis.

5. Identify your paragraph transitions. Make sure that each new/subsequent paragraph flows from the point you made in your previous paragraph. Use keywords from your previous paragraphs in your transitional sentences to enhance the flow of your argument and link your ideas from paragraph to paragraph.

6. Find your quotes. Eliminate all “floating quotes” that stand alone as separate sentences without any signal phrases. Make sure that your quotes are integrated effectively into the flow of your writing and that they are set up with signal words and phrases.

7. Check the punctuation of your quotes and your parenthetical citations. Periods and commas always go inside “quote s,” like “thi s.” Periods always go outside parenthetical citations, like this: (778). 1

8. Re-read the formatting instructions for the assignment. Make sure that your paper is formatted properly with proper margins (1 inch), double-spaced, and proper font and font size (12pt Times New Roman).

General (*minimum) Expectations for ALL College writers:

· Write in third person , and avoid saying “I think” or “I believe.” I already know that you think it because you are writing about it.

· Use academic diction/language. Don’t write like you talk.

· Put quotation marks around the titles of short stories, poems, and essays.

· Italicize the titles of books and films.

· Refer to authors by their last names or their full names, not their first names. Put commas and periods inside quote marks.

· When using parenthetical citations, put commas, periods and other punctuation marks after parenthetical citations.

· Refer to people as “who”; refer to things as “that.”

· Use paragraph transitions to link ideas from one paragraph to the next and describe how your line of reasoning is developing.

· Link your topic sentences to your thesis.