Reviewing Your Own Work, Part 1

How do you review your own writing? Why should you spend time on this? Doing a good review of your writing before you send it to your chair or other committee member can save you a great deal of time in the end. Remember, every time a faculty member reads your paper they are allowed up to two weeks- if you can reduce the number of reviews needed- it can save you months! 

I recommend a several stage process of self-review. Yes, it will take you time and it is not particularly fun, but it will save valuable time and it will also teach you to write! Today, I am going to talk about reviewing at the micro level of individual paragraphs and sections. Make sure that you have spell check and grammar check turned on in your paper. If you are not seeing some words/ sentences underlined in red or green, go to the help menu and check if they are turned on. Make sure that you then check all of the items in red (spelling) and green (grammar issues) underlined. 

Step 1 is to pick a small section of your paper; read the section aloud, carefully listening for grammatical errors and missing words. If you find that you have difficulty with this part, use Grammarly in the Walden Writing Center, it will point out grammatical issues. 

Step 2, read through the section again checking for APA errors. There are several common problems that students have – citations and use of the words "we" and "our". Read those sections of the APA manual and make sure you are doing them correctly. Make sure any jargon are defined (a good rule of thumb, would your grandmother or friend not in psychology, understand the term? If not, define it). 

Step 3 is the hardest one – check your content. Make sure that you are only talking about one topic in each paragraph. Are your arguments clear? Does every fact or statement have a citation? Check the length of your paragraphs, break up long ones (there should be no page long paragraphs).  

Step 4, go back to the checklist and make sure you have addressed the issues for that section. When you are satisfied with the section, move on to the next one. 

Next time we will talk about reviewing your work at a macro level- making sure chapters and the full paper are consistent.  Do you have an issue or a question that you would like me to discuss in a future post? Would you like to be a guest writer? Send me your ideas! leann.stadtlander@waldenu.edu