Righting Writing

Insert jokey caption here...

(picture:www.slate.com )

The excerpt above, which is from a paper published in the journal Ethology has caught a lot of media attention these last few days.  It highlights why proofreading is so important.  I always tell my students what my teachers told me:  "Finish your assignment a few days before the deadline and don't look at it for two whole days." The idea behind this is that they will be reading their assignments with 'fresh eyes'.  But it's not just errors like this that occur in essays.  There are so many reasons proofreading is essential:

• To spot word repetition and word repetition
• To pick up on repeated ideas.  Also to pick up on ideas that have been repeated
• To notice spelling or grammatical errors (spellchecker is good, but it. does no pick-up on, everythin)
• To look if there are some not good written sentences
• To note a particularly long rambling sentence which really should have some form of punctuation to break it up into smaller segments but it doesn't because you wrote it when you were really tired and it seemed to make sense to you at the time but if you leave it like that it will affect your grade but if you proofread it later on you can correct it and make it sound like you are actually an intelligent person and not a fuzzy-head
• To detect a missing word within a sentence.  This could really the meaning
• To ensure you haven't used contractions.  They don't have any place in an academic essay and you shouldn't use them. 
• To make sure it all makes sense.  Because a sentence that has no sense is the opposite of pure and therefore must be immoral. 
• Coz it's supposed to read like an academic text; not like you're just talking to a mate.
• To see if there are any ambiguities 
• To check that there are no sentences that wander off in another direction, such as being sleepy when you are tired. 

But going back to the excerpt that caused this stir, I have a great way to avoid this. I always leave myself little notes all over my rough draft, such as:

• Give example
• Get quote
• Find out more 
• Re-read the chapter in that yellow book that deals with this

But I always write them in red  

These days we all use word processors, and unless you are restricted to WordPad you should be able to make use of colour, bold, a different font or size; anything that draws attention to the little instructions and notes-to-self so that they don't end up in your final draft.  This is such a basic use of computing technology, but it's a technique that works so I'm sticking with it.

(Picture: www.keepcalm-o-matic.co.uk)

Full article on 'Crappy Gabor Paper' blunder can be found here