Rules for Writers Chapter 3

On Chapter 3 from “Rules for Writers” by Diana Hackers, she talks about how to revise an essay.  First, it’s important to divide the process in to two sections: a global revision and revising sentences.  A global revision would focus on the purpose, the organization, the content, and the strategy of your essay, while the revision of sentences would focus on possible improvements to the sentences, choice of words, grammar, punctuation, and the mechanics.  Hacker suggests that it’s good to take a day or more before going back to your essay to begin with the global revision and to “try to play the role of your audience” as this might help you come up with some questions that your readers might have.  Later, when you move down to your sentences, Hacker advices to revise first your sentences focusing on “effectiveness” and then work on edit them by checking for “correctness”.  She also mentions how some computers have a spell and/or grammar checkers that can be helpful.  The problem with spell checkers is that they would only mark as wrong words that haven’t been found on the dictionary regardless of its misused, and grammar checkers don’t count with “an understanding of grammatical structure”, therefore, it’s good to keep them handy but not to relay on them 100%.  Finally, it’s time for proofreading.   On this final step, try to read your essay slowly as you are looking for “misspellings, typographical mistakes, and omitted words or endings”.  Hacker suggests reading a loud your essay or reading your sentences in reverse order, as this would make you think of the sentence itself and not on how the essay works as a whole.

I found something very interesting on this chapter; I never would have thought of reading an essay “backwards” starting on the last sentence and moving backwards till the first one.  I tried reading a couple sentences of something I wrote in that manner and I found it a little confusing, perhaps, because as I’m reading I’m not sure on what to expect next.  This would probably be of much help as I try to revise future assignments since, just like Hacker says, I don’t read what is actually written on the paper but what I think “should” be written and this causes me to skip a lot of errors.