Local Revision: Rewriting Language and Page Layout

Rewriting Language

• Does the content of your essay accomplish your purpose with your audience?
• Does your thesis statement make a claim or assertion about your topic?
• Does the evidence you've selected support your thesis adequately? Is it relevant to the interests and needs of your readers?
• Does your paper have a clear pattern of organization that is easy for your readers to follow?

If you can answer Yes to each of these questions, then you are ready for local revision--looking closely at:

• point of view
• consistent verb tense
• tone
• sentences
• phrases and words
• page layout.

Point of View

In your paper, do you use the first-person point of view, "I"? In many writing situations this direct and personal voice is appropriate, and it is becoming more common even in formal academic writing. However, some audiences still prefer the more traditional third person point of view in college writing. What are the expectations of your audience?

In any case, it is not correct to use the pronoun you as a generic pronoun to refer to people in general. For example,

"Pets become a neighborhood nuisance when you do not observe leash laws."

It is preferable to write, "Pets become a neighborhood nuisance when their owners do not observe leash laws."

"Their owners" is more specific and accurate than the general "you" in the previous sentence. Reserve you for writing that addresses the reader directly. Re-read your paper. Do you use I or you? Is this use appropriate for your audience and purpose? Is your choice of point of view consistent throughout your paper?

For a review of point of view, see the handbook.

Consistent Verb Tense

Does most of the action of your paper occur in the present or the past? Often we have the inclination to begin a paper in the present tense, but the past tense is more natural for story-telling. Since, for the teller at least, the story has already happened, it is difficult to stay in the present tense from the beginning to the end of a piece. Unnecessary tense shifts are jarring and even confusing to the reader. A change in verb tense should be used to signal time movement. Re-read your paper and pay close attention to verb tense. Do you need to make any revisions?

For a review of verb tense see the handbook.

Tone

To understand tone in writing, think about how you use tone in your voice to communicate your attitude to a listener in a conversation. Your tone might be serious, teasing, sarcastic, questioning, tentative, or assertive. You may be loving or angry, friendly or distant, professional or casual. Writers can choose as many different tones of voice as speakers can. When you think about it, you will see that tone has to do with the writer's attitudes toward the reader and toward the subject.

How close or distant do you want to be with your reader? Think about this distance being expressed along a continuum:

most personal --------------------------------------------------- least personal
most intimate --------------------------------------------------- distant

What attitude do you have about your subject?

casual ---------------------------------------------------------------------- formal
hobby --------------------- professional --------technical ------------------ academic

slang --------------standard vocabulary -----technical vocabulary----------- learned vocabulary
sentence fragments -------standard sentence structure ---------------sentences may be more complex
contractions -------------- few contractions --------------------------------- no contractions

Where do your purpose, subject, and audience place your paper along these lines? Re-read your paper paying close attention to tone.
Is your tone appropriate?
Is it consistent throughout the piece?

For a review of tone, see your handbook.

Sentences

Sentence structure contributes to tone. The use of short sentences and even fragments will make your writing more causal; longer, more complex sentences raise the reading level to a more educated audience and more formal situations. There are other qualities of sentences that you will want to edit at this point.

• Are your sentences concise?

Are there any unneeded words you can eliminate? Are there any redundancies you can revise?
Can you revise passive sentences by making the doer of the action the subject of the sentence?
Can you combine sentences? Can you eliminate fragments by combining them with the preceding or succeeding sentence?
Are there any phrases or clauses you can reduce or delete?
Can you replace any form of the verb to be with a stronger verb? Can you delete any adverbs or adjectives by using stronger verbs instead?

• Do you express the relationship of ideas through effective coordination and subordination?

Do you use coordination to show ideas are balanced or equivalent ? A coordinate or compound sentence contains grammatically equivalent independent clauses joined by a comma and a coordinating conjunction (and, but, for, or, nor, so, yet) or by a semicolon.

Do you use subordination to express non-equivalent ideas? A complex sentence expresses the subordinate idea in a dependent clause. This de-emphasizes it and shows its relationship to the main idea that is expressed in the independent clause. Remember, the main idea of the sentence should be in the independent clause.

• Are your sentences easy to read because they are clear and precise? Re-read your paper and pay close attention to these potential problems:

faulty parallelism
too many short sentences
run-on sentences
comma splices
misplaced modifiers
missing transitions

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Phrases and Words

Have you used exact words to say what you mean? Do you use words like things, stuff, and people very often? If so, can you think of more precise words to use instead? Here are three common problems to avoid:

• Avoid mixed metaphors--combining images that do not work together.

"The cancer cells invaded the liver where they lay smoldering."

• Avoid clichés--worn out expressions that may once have been clever but now sound trite.

"We heard the weather warnings, and by the time we got home it was raining cats and dogs."

• Avoid unnecessary jargon--a specialized vocabulary that is only understood by a particular group that is not your target audience.

"When I'm writing webs, I want access to the document source so I can de-bug the HTML, check all the character references, tags and hyperlinks, and insert JAVA applets."

For more information, review "Effective Sentences and Words" in your on-line handbook.

Page Layout: Using Style Manuals

When you are ready to prepare your final draft, you may have questions about whether or not you should use a title page, how wide the margins should be, and how you should cite sources. A style manual gives these guidelines. Many college departments adopt a particular style manual for students to follow for all assignments, especially research papers, theses, and dissertations.

Likewise, most publications have established "writers' guidelines" to standardize page layout, and corporations use guidelines to standardize the look of all the company's print materials.

What are the expectations of your target audience? Has a particular style manual or set of guidelines been assigned for this project?

The most commonly used style manuals in the U. S.are:

• MLA (Modern Language Association)
• APA (American Psychological Association)
• CM (Chicago Manual published by the University of Chicago Press)
• CBE (Council of Biology Editors)

Web Pages

Web page layouts can be much more complex than print layouts because:

• The reader does not have to move through the text in a linear pattern, so the writer must think of the page as multidimensional. Writing web pages can be a lot like playing 3-dimensional chess.
• The "page" can be multimedia and interactive with images, animation, navigation tools, and forms for reader interaction.

On a flat piece of paper, the writer can only manipulate letters and pictures, usually in a linear pattern for the reader to move from left to right across and down the page. As you can see from the above list, the web page writer has many more design elements to manage. To begin, you can treat a web page as though it were a flat piece of paper and format it in much the same way, but the medium challenges us to leave "flatland" behind and exploit the capabilities that technology offers us. We are only beginning to discover the possibilities, and much of our work--like the Writers' PLACE itself--is still laden with the conventions of a print culture.

Nevertheless, there are already some style guides available for web page designers, but these are just as dynamic as the web itself is. Here are only three of several you can find through a web search:

http://www.sun.com/styleguide
http://info.med.yale.edu/caim/manual/contents.html
http://www.htmlhelp.com