The Role Of Mistakes In My Paper
If I've said it once I've probably said it lots of times and forgot, but I never find more mistakes in my rough drafts until the minute I submit the paper to be graded. There is a point where no matter how closely I read the sentences and check punctuation or citations my brain starts to glass over even the really obvious mistakes in the paper. For this reason, I start the revision process by having several different people look at the paper in different locations like the library, writing center, Starbucks, or a restaurant. After I've weeded out all the mistakes, I rewrite the rough draft by hand to check that I've tied off all loose ends and I don't have any random tangents in my paragraphs. I follow that up with running my paper though several free apps to double check on my grammar and punctuation before submitting the final product.
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The idea to have different people look at my paper in different locations came from English 101 after I realized that I instantly feel self-conscious about my paper when someone else looks at it.
That lead apron on dread kicks in and suddenly I find myself scanning my paper like a supercomputer to mark the mistakes before someone gets the satisfaction of pointing them out to me. The different locations take away my ability to "go do something else" so I have to sit there are watch that person look over my paper instead of treating it like a test I just pray I get a good grade on. There are probably better ways to go about the peer-review process, but boy it really snaps my head into focus. Trying to work at home is nearly impossible because getting up to do one task suddenly turns into a rendition of "If You Give a Mouse a
Cookie".
Once the painful part is over, I rewrite out the paper by hand and for two reasons: first, because I lose my train of thought often when I type and second, so I can draw and connect all my paragraphs together to tie up the loose ends. I noticed in my rough draft that my thesis states ethics committees can reduce the number of death cases that end up in court, but I forgot to add in exactly HOW many cases go to court yearly and their cost. There are several paragraphs about WHY people take doctors to court over death disputes, but I still left the loose end in my paragraph. However, I did reward myself for remembering to link together old and new information without really realizing it.
Finally, when everything flows logically and all the mistakes are weeded out I actually type the paper directly into the free version of Grammarly. Grammarly grabs all the big mistakes for me with the suggested corrections, then gives me a number of other minor mistakes to fix, but I'm not paying $100 for the app. Instead, I copy and paste the paper from Grammarly into Paperrater.com which gives me a run down of passive voice use, a number of transition words, punctuation mistakes, and simple sentence starts. After that has been corrected the paper then gets copied and pasted into ProWritingAid.com which tells me what words I've overused, what sentences are too long or too short, and which sentences are overly wordy. The last stop on the app checkers is PolishMyWriting.com which picks out the remaining hidden verbs or grammar issues. By that point, I feel pretty confident I caught everything and do one last citation check.
For the final citation check, there are some free plagiarism checkers online, but they are very hit or miss on what they pick up. Mostly, I just print the final product and use my highlighters to match the articles in the works cited to the in-text citations so all the authors are listed appropriately. All in all, this whole process takes a long time since I spend most of my time starting at the paper after work thinking about what to cook for supper and whether or not I feel like working out today. I'm really grateful that in this class we had the entire semester to work on this paper so there was time to actually "wallow in the complexity" over slapping stuff together for a grade without really learning anything new.
The idea to have different people look at my paper in different locations came from English 101 after I realized that I instantly feel self-conscious about my paper when someone else looks at it.
That lead apron on dread kicks in and suddenly I find myself scanning my paper like a supercomputer to mark the mistakes before someone gets the satisfaction of pointing them out to me. The different locations take away my ability to "go do something else" so I have to sit there are watch that person look over my paper instead of treating it like a test I just pray I get a good grade on. There are probably better ways to go about the peer-review process, but boy it really snaps my head into focus. Trying to work at home is nearly impossible because getting up to do one task suddenly turns into a rendition of "If You Give a Mouse a
Cookie".
Once the painful part is over, I rewrite out the paper by hand and for two reasons: first, because I lose my train of thought often when I type and second, so I can draw and connect all my paragraphs together to tie up the loose ends. I noticed in my rough draft that my thesis states ethics committees can reduce the number of death cases that end up in court, but I forgot to add in exactly HOW many cases go to court yearly and their cost. There are several paragraphs about WHY people take doctors to court over death disputes, but I still left the loose end in my paragraph. However, I did reward myself for remembering to link together old and new information without really realizing it.
Finally, when everything flows logically and all the mistakes are weeded out I actually type the paper directly into the free version of Grammarly. Grammarly grabs all the big mistakes for me with the suggested corrections, then gives me a number of other minor mistakes to fix, but I'm not paying $100 for the app. Instead, I copy and paste the paper from Grammarly into Paperrater.com which gives me a run down of passive voice use, a number of transition words, punctuation mistakes, and simple sentence starts. After that has been corrected the paper then gets copied and pasted into ProWritingAid.com which tells me what words I've overused, what sentences are too long or too short, and which sentences are overly wordy. The last stop on the app checkers is PolishMyWriting.com which picks out the remaining hidden verbs or grammar issues. By that point, I feel pretty confident I caught everything and do one last citation check.
For the final citation check, there are some free plagiarism checkers online, but they are very hit or miss on what they pick up. Mostly, I just print the final product and use my highlighters to match the articles in the works cited to the in-text citations so all the authors are listed appropriately. All in all, this whole process takes a long time since I spend most of my time starting at the paper after work thinking about what to cook for supper and whether or not I feel like working out today. I'm really grateful that in this class we had the entire semester to work on this paper so there was time to actually "wallow in the complexity" over slapping stuff together for a grade without really learning anything new.