Revising an Academic Final Draft
Purpose of assignment: To practice revision skills by revising your Week 6 Rough Draft.
Procedure: For this assignment, you will revise your Rough Draft by considering the feedback you have received from your instructor and fellow classmates. Please note that revision is not the same as fixing-errors. While you are expected to proofread your final paper carefully, you will also need to consider global and local revisions. (See your textbook for definitions of these terms.) The goal is to write the best paper you can, and, while you have received feedback from readers (your instructor and the class), the choices of what and how to revise are up to you.
However, please note that your revision must show significant effort to improve the quality of your writing. This may include (but is not limited to) the following:
· strengthening your argument
· narrowing the focus of your topic
· reconsidering your audience, purpose, or exigence
· writing a more compelling introduction
· clarifying your thesis
· tightening organization
· using credible sources or more fully integrating the sources you have
· wrapping up your paper with a satisfying conclusion
· citing and documenting sources correctly.
*Simply correcting errors does not count as revision. Writing a new paper on a different topic also does not count as revision.
The criteria for this assignment are the same as for your Week 6 Rough Draft:
Purpose of assignment: To compose a rough draft of an academic paper, using exigence, audience, purpose, and research.
Procedure: In previous assignments and discussions, you have selected a topic to write about, explored its exigence, audience, purpose, and researched the topic using credible, scholarly sources. Now you will put it all together into a rough draft.
· The purpose of your essay (to define, to evaluate, or to propose) will be up to you, but your essay must demonstrate a clear purpose.
· The audience for your essay can be any group of readers who are affected by or interested in your topic. However, there must be a clear and specific sense of addressed and invoked audiences.
The purpose of this essay is not to prove whether you are right or wrong, but to show that you understand the topic well from multiple angles so you can represent it fairly and contribute in a meaningful way to an ongoing conversation about it. You may think of your essay as an “argument of inquiry”: intended to lead your audience to a deeper understanding of an issue that affects them.
Your rough draft should meet the following guidelines:
1. Between 900 and 1200 words
2. Includes quotations, paraphrases, and summaries from four or more scholarly sources representing more than one side of the issue
3. Qualifies authors (i.e., shows why your sources are credible)
4. Withholds personal opinion
5. Is written in third person
6. Multimodal elements, such as photos or graphics, may be included at your discretion
7. Includes APA Style in-text citations and a References page
8. Has been closely edited so it contains few or no mechanical errors
Although you will have a chance to revise this essay for Week 8, understand that writing is a process and that no one “gets it right” on the first draft. For this reason, you should allow yourself plenty of time to work on this paper and even write a few drafts before you submit one for peer review and grading. For more on peer review, see below.
Format: Standard essay format of introduction, body, and conclusion. Your introduction should include a thesis statement that expresses the main point of your essay. For an example of an academic essay, see “Echoes of 1776 in 2011: A Rhetorical Analysis of Nicholas Kristof’s ‘Watching Protesters at Risk’” in Chapter 13 of your textbook.
Format the assignment in APA Style: one-inch margins, page numbers at the top right, 12-pt. Times New Roman font, running heads, title page, in-text citations, and a references page.
Submitting the assignment: Attach your essay as a single file Word document or .pdf file and submit to the W8 assignment drop box.
View your assignment rubric.