a checklist for editing

8/3/2019 A Checklist for Editing

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A Checklist for Editing

N. Sivinrev. 2004.12.14

This checklist is a guide not only for revising drafts, but also for teaching yourself or reviewingthe most basic elements that you need to think critically about your own writing. This is oftennecessary, since most schools no longer teach grammar. That may be unavoidable because of inadequate budgets, but it drastically shortchanges their students. [Go directly to the Checklist ]

If you do not fully understand the concepts and general idea of any item below, click on the link at the end of it (underlined and in color) and you will be taken to a detailed explanation.Examples accompany each explanation. Many of the bad examples come from scholarlypublications, since academic writing can be as prolix and sloppy as any other kind of writing.When you are ready to return to the original item, click on the return link. If any explanation isnot clear, or if further detail is needed, see me or use the link at the end of this page to send me amessage about the problem.

It may be that you need or want more help than this concentrated guide provides. Of themany detailed manuals and reference guides I have examined, A Writers Reference , by DianaHacker (4th ed., Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 1999), is the best. It is available fromPennsylvania Book Center on 34th Street.

Good prose aims to be clear and concise, because its purpose is communication, to persuadeother people to agree with something you think or believe. Great prose may take more windingpaths to communication, but if you haven't learned to write well you will not learn to writesuperbly.

Keep in mind that most education takes place outside of schools, and that a good deal of it tendsto make writing not clearer and more concise, but vaguer and wordier. Most of what you readand watch on the tube exists for one of two purposes. Adspeak aims to convince you thatsomething just like its competitors is unique, so you will buy it. Bureaucratese aims to drownyou in verbiage so that the functionary who writes it will not be held responsible when thedocument turns out to be wrong or misleading. You will find some remarks on the specialcharacteristics of bureaucratese below.

1. Title and Lead Sentence: Titles are not generally required for course papers, but they are agood idea, since they let the reader know at the outset what you mean to say. A good leadsentence whets the reader's appetite with a taste of how you mean to say it. Comment_1

2. Concision: Unless you are able to write baroque prose with true art, ask of every word andevery sentence whether it is essential. If it isn't, get rid of it. Comment 2

3. Clear Structure: As you go over each sentence, strip it down to its basic structure usuallysubject-verb-object and see whether problems emerge. **For instance, if you aren't sure what'swrong with "A broader spectrum of opinion should be given consideration," when you strip it
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down to "spectrum should be given consideration," its lack of impact, and the sidelining of thekey word "broader," become obvious. This vague example may mean "[Who?] should ask more[of whose?] opinions." Comment 3

4. Noun Used as Adjective: Bureaucrats string nouns together to hide the relation that a

preposition would clarify. If your aim is not to confuse, make sure that the relation will beunambiguous to someone who knows nothing about the subject matter. If it isn't, connect thenouns with a preposition, the normal connecting link. The bureaucratese "improving patientcare" may refer to being more patient when caring, to patients caring more, or to taking care of patients. Comment 4

5. Action in Verb: What word in the sentence describes the main action? If not the verb, rewrite.The bureaucratese "perform customer servicing" combines a flabby verb with misuse of a wordthat means to maintain inanimate objects such as automobiles; the corresponding English phraseis "serve customers." Keep in mind too that whoever carries out the main action shouldordinarily be the subject of the sentence. Comment 5

6. Apostrophe: Essential-- never optional --to signal the possessive: "women's income," "themembers' table." There is one important exception. "It's" means not "belonging to it" but "it is"(and, in speech, "it has"). "Its" is the possessive ("in its place"). Comment 6

7. Quotation Marks: Are they employed for a direct quotation, a technical term about to bedefined, or for a word knowingly misused? If none of these for instance, if you are writing an"ordinary" colloquial phrase don't use them. They signal to readers that you don't mean whatyou say but aren't willing to reveal what you mean (what did I mean in the last sentence?).Comment 7

8. Punctuation. There are three common problems to keep in mind:(a) Review, if necessary, when clauses need to be set off by commas and when they don't. Asimple test: Are you sure of the difference of meaning between "This beetle has spread throughthe Eastern states where the climate suits it" and "This beetle has spread through the Easternstates, where the climate suits it"? Keep in mind too that unless a clause begins or ends asentence one comma is not enough to set it off. Comment 8a

(b) If you aren't sure about the colon and semicolon, learn them or else dont use them. A simpletest: which one can you use to join closely related sentences? If you are tempted to run sentencestogether with "and," make sure they are intimately related. You can't use a comma to run two

sentences together, no matter how closely related they may be. Avoid using the clumsy"however" to make run-on sentences. Comment 8b

(c) Hyphenate compound adjectives. "He is not an active duty officer" may mean he is lazywhen on duty; "active-duty officer" is not ambiguous. Comment 8c

9. Passive: Is it essential? If not, make it active. Bureaucrats love passive constructions, becauseby concealing the actor they hide responsibility. The functionary's "it was asserted that all
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information exchanged within the organization should be via paper documents" (verb "be")might become in plain English "[someone] proposed that we exchange all information on paper"(verb "exchange). Comment 9

10. Consistency in Lists: If you list a series of items, are they consistent in number and form?

There is no mystery about how to repair "the main causes of death are viruses, tuberculosisbacillus, and to eat too much." If you don't know whether "bacillus" is singular or plural, look itup. Comment 10

11. Number of Noun and Verb or Pronoun: Is a singular noun followed by a plural verb, orthe other way around? When you strip down "the creative ideas that originate in this office is notalways fruitful" to "ideas is fruitful" the error becomes obvious. Comment 11

12. Spelling: Spelling is not an adult problem. Cure it by getting and using a good dictionary--and by proofreading. Comment 12

13. Proofreading: An essential step in writing is to read your final copy carefully and make last-minute corrections in black ink. Even if your paper is beautifully written and printed, if it hasmany typos, readers will doubt that you cared enough to give it your best try. Comment 13

14. Printing: Make sure everything is double-spaced, including footnotes. Put a running headeror footer with at least the page number on every page after the first. Comment 14

Return to the top of the Checklist

Commentaries

1. Title and Lead Sentence

One of the best ways to make writing dull is to assume that the reader doesn't mind being bored.In the so-called real world outside the university, readers pick up something, look at it, decidewhether it looks interesting or useful, and put it down unless something about it has convincedthem that it is worth the trouble. If you don't make your argument accessible and attractive, even those forced to read it will give it a minimum of attention and thought, and forget it rightaway. In other words, attention can never be taken for granted; it has to be earned.

Readers want to know what a piece of non-fiction writing is about. They normally give theauthor the benefit of the doubt, assuming that she has something she wants to communicate and

to persuade them to think about. In return, they expect that she will tell them what that topic is.

The first step in satisfying this expectation is the title . A title states the subject clearly andconcisely enough so that the reader begins with a general idea. Coy or mysterious wording willfascinate a few readers and drive away the rest. On the other hand, finding a funny or witty wayto encapsulate the topic is likely to be attractive.
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The second step is the lead sentence. It may reveal the basic elements of the paper what it willargue, in what way, using what evidence or it may say something fascinating. If it offersnothing that will make an undecided person read on, you will lose your readers. Even if it sayssomething worth while, if it says it in a convoluted way, or meanders, or relies on academicwindiness to sound authoritative, it will turn readers off. Deal boldly with a blah lead sentence.

Throw it out, ask yourself what would tempt your roommate into reading on, and write thatinstead.

The actual beginning of an important article entitled "Learning Mathematical Sciences during theEarly and Mid-Ch'ing": "The study of the role of scientific knowledge in learning and educationin Ch'ing China can be linked to the concerns of comparative history." Academics write quite alot about the role of this and that in something else, so this sentence prepares the reader for lotsof clichs. Why are both "learning" and "education" necessary? The author gives no clue. "Canbe linked" is what critics of writing call a "meta-statement." Meta-statements are not about thetopic, but about talking about the topic. In academese, as a way of evading clear statement, theycan become very elaborate, for instance "it can be said without undue fear of contradiction

that " Such ruminations suggest that the author is more interested in writing aboutpotentialities than in stating a concrete proposition with which some people will agree but others,inevitably, disagree. What action is going on in this all-too-stately sentence? Who can say? Themain verb (item 5 ) is "link," but linking to concerns is hardly likely to be a major theme of thepaper. "Can be linked" is also passive (item 9 ), so that it manages to hide who can potentially dothis mysterious linking. Finally, the author assumes that the reader knows what Ch'ing China is,or doesn't care if she doesn't one more turnoff. Ho hum!

Turning the main point of this sentence into an uncomplicated and interesting statement is noteasy, since the author did not provide enough clear and concrete information. Since you can'tforce it out of the author, you can only guess. My guess (after reading the essay) is that it means

something like "From 1700 on, science was at least as important in Chinese education as it wasanywhere else in the world." This is a bold claim the point of the article is to prove it and itcertainly engages the reader's attention. The lead sentence doesn't need to go on about "theconcerns of comparative history," since it has made the comparison concretely.

Try this one yourself: "When we discuss the all-important aspect of technology in themodernization of Japan, reference to the Dutch or the British connection is usually in order."(Return to item One )

2. Concision

Readers generally, like you, usually have more to read than they have time to read it. When anauthor takes a lot of words to say something that she could have said in a few, that signals a lack of regard for the reader's time. Readers sooner or later sense it, and lose patience, no matter howclever or sound an argument is hidden under the verbal flab. In "the areas of emphasis on whichthe researchers concentrated," "emphasis" and "concentrate" are saying the same thing, and"areas" doesn't add to the meaning. "The researchers' emphases" says it all.
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Bureaucrats, who find it a professional asset not to be understood, look for complicated ways tosay simple things. It is tempting, if you want a lie to sound innocuous, to say "at this point intime" instead of "now." At the moment, talking about a "time period," when either "time" or"period" will do the job, is trendy but just going out of fashion (that's the trouble with fashions).It is an interesting game to spot the prolixity in the writing of any second-rate academic author.

There is only one way to avoid this subversion of your own argument: banish the flab. A newproblem often arises when, once you have peeled off the verbiage, an idea that seemed clearturns out not to be clear at all. You therefore need to make sure that the point you intended tomake is the focus of the sentence.

This is the beginning of a book on the history of eye diseases: "No organ is comparable to theeye in its importance as a link between man and his environment. To be deaf, or to have lostdermal sensitivity such handicaps are severe and create a definite obstacle to the perception of the world we live in.... No such impairment, though, equals blindness."

The idea is an interesting one, but the author is trying too hard to sound medically sophisticatedand professorial. "Create a definite obstacle to the perception of the world we live in" is a wordyway to say that they are handicaps, a point promptly repeated. The sentence is also wordy,mainly because the author has taken the actions and put them into nouns (obstacle, perception;see item 5 ).

Thinking about the main idea, and trying to move it into the focus, how simply can we make thispoint? Although "numbness" is a bit less specific than "lost dermal sensitivity," it is a moreconcise and therefore more effective way to make the point of this non-technical sentence.Combining the two sentences makes the main point more clearly: "Deafness and numbness cutus off from the world we live in, but blindness is the worst obstacle of all." That's all the book

needs.Try this one: "China has been continuously inhabited by the Chinese since the Paleolithic period(500,000 B.C.), when Peking man, Homo erectus pekinensis, hunted large animals, butcheredthem with stone tools, and cooked them over open fires; yet as much as three-quarters of his dietmay have been of vegetable origin." (Return to item two )

3. Clear Structure

To strip a sentence down to its elements, you have to recognize the elements. You don't need awhole high-school course in English to do that. The essential elements are subject, verb, and

object. If you can recognize them, you can avoid most structural problems.Let's review the essential characteristics of each. Keep in mind that many sentences havecomplex modifiers. The first question to ask is "what is the main part of the sentence, which therest qualifies or elaborates?" In "regardless of whether you approve, I'm going, with no intentionof coming back," the nucleus of the sentence is nothing more than "I'm going." Everything else

just qualifies that, so you can strip it off mentally.
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Subject. The subject names what the sentence is about. It can be a phrase, of course. When youencounter something like "Historical monographs that contain no lies are tedious," you canrecognize that it is about certain kinds of monographs that are tedious; monograph is thus thesimple subject. It clearly isn't saying that lies are tedious; "that contain no lies" simply specifies asubset of all monographs.

A sentence may have more than one subject, connected with "and" or "or" ("and/or" isbureaucratic verbiage, since either word can imply both). Resourceful writers can, of course,invert sentences. For instance, starting with "The head that wears the crown is heavy," you canput the emphasis on the burden by transforming it into "Heavy is the head that wears the crown."The sentence is still about a head, so turning it inside out doesn't change the subject.

A common way of transforming a sentence into a question is by changing the subject or order."Somebody will go with you," by changing the subject into a question word, becomes "Who willgo with you?" "Going with you is always boring" can become "Why is going with you alwaysboring?" "You will go with me," if the subject goes inside the complex verb, can become the

question "Will you go with me?"

Verb. Verbs can express a state or an action. "John is tired" is about John's state. In addition to"be" verbs, others such as "feel, look," can express a state: "John looks tired." But most verbs saywhat the subject did: "John ate dinner." Some verbs do it better than others (item 5 ).

Object. The object says what or who received the action. Some verbs (transitive ones) have tospecify the object ("dinner" in the last example) and others (intransitive ones) don't. Normal pasttense, for instance, is "he lay on the bed," without an object (unlike "he painted the bed"). Ahallmark of Philadelphia dialect is "he laid on the bed." But "laid" is a transitive verb, so he musthave laid something on the bed. Outside of Philly, if you used "laid," you would have to say

something like "he laid an egg on the bed." "Egg" in that sentence is called a direct object, sincewith some verbs you can also have, even in the same sentence, a second object. This indirectobject tells to whom or for whom the action was done. In "he gave me the cat," which is thesame as "he gave the cat to me" the cat is what he gave, and I am the recipient. This soundscomplicated, but if you remember that the direct object does not imply "to", "for," etc. and theindirect object does, it's easy to keep them separated. Since dealing with the passive voice (item9) needs a clear understanding of these basic elements, it is a good idea when editing to payparticular attention to that item. (Return to item three )

4. Noun Used as Adjective

Advertising copywriters despise candor, but often seek the appearance of efficiency by clumpingnouns together. If you see "user patronage free offer," and you have been initiated into adspeak,you may be able to guess that this means "a free offer to users in return for their patronage," andof course will realize that you will actually pay in one way or another for what you get. If youare not used to it, without the prepositions "to" and "in return for" that provide clarity in normalEnglish, you may not be able to tell how the three nouns are related. If you get so used to thepatterns of adspeak that you confuse them with English, you may find, as you edit your drafts,that you are piling up sequences of nouns. The way to overcome this habit is to be alert for them,
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and to ask yourself whether you will do better to connect them with prepositions. (Return to itemfour )

5. Action in Verb

The art of bureaucratese is to mislead: to do what you have to do without admitting it, to makepeople think you are doing something they want done, to make sure if they complain that youcan deny that they are complaining about the right thing, and above all to avoid responsibilitywhen you are wrong. There are two supreme techniques: hiding the action, discussed here, andhiding who is acting (item 9 ). If you do it well, readers wont guess that "it was determined that arecision of A should be enacted" means that you have arranged (without public legislation, of course) that they are no longer entitled to what their elected representatives decided you aresupposed to provide them. If you were to say honestly "I have made sure that you will no longerget A," once the storm was over you might be unemployed.

Like other bureaucratic tools, this one has penetrated deeply into everyday writing. It is not at allunusual to use a blah verb and hide the action somewhere else--not for any purpose, but just as ahabit. Like the passive (item 9 ), it is one that some scientists and engineers cultivate, becausetheir teachers tell them it is professional to hide the fact that a mere human being is doing theresearch and forming conclusions. Humanists, to the contrary, are not ashamed to admit it, and toacknowledge that objectivity is hypocrisy.

Getting rid of this problem is easier than getting rid of the habit. As you edit, for each sentence just ask yourse lf "what is the main action of the sentence?" If it isnt in the verb, move it there.

In "a surge of power was responsible for the destruction of the cooling pumps," the action isdestroying, and the verb is "was." Once you realize that, it becomes clear how wordy thissentence is. The simplest way to improve it is "a surge of power destroyed the cooling pumps."You have made your point in 8 words instead of 13, without leaving out a single idea(responsibility is not what the sentence is about). (Return to item five )

6. Apostrophe

Confusing "its" and "its" is nothing more elaborate than either poor English skills or

carelessness. The latter is a very dangerous habit. It can guarantee that a professional school'sadmissions committee will reject your application as substandard in command of English. Look thoughtfully at every instance of either word in your drafts.

Note that bureaucrats, to blur meaning, use nouns as adjectives instead of the possessive (item 4 )."Clinical patient understanding" has three possible meanings; "clinical patient's understanding" isclear. (Return to item six )
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7. Quotation Marks

The three normal uses of quotation marks, enumerated above, are unproblematic. Many writersmisuse quotation marks because they feel uneasy about a word they are using, and haven'tthought out why that is. They want to warn the reader to look at it thoughtfully. It doesn't work.

When you say something like "the purpose of an army is to win a war or to keep the peace," forinstance, you may feel that states of peace, once armies get involved, are likely no longer to be peaceful. Your skepticism may motivate you to write "to keep the peace." But that is a subtlethought, and most readers whose minds are on different wavelengths from yours wont get it. If you dont spell out what you mean by "peace," your idea will be lost, and you will leave thereader frustrated. (Return to item seven )

8. Punctuation

First, punctuating clauses: there are two kinds of clauses that describe nouns or pronouns(clauses are groups of words that hang together). A restrictive clause affects the meaning of theword it modifies by specifying a subset. If you leave it out, the meaning of the sentence changes.Because it is essential, you do not set it off by commas. For instance, if you begin with "short

people cant see far in a crowd" and make it more specific, you may come up with somethinglike "members of the sophomore class who are not over five feet tall cant see far in a crowd."That sentence makes sense, since the restrictive clause "who are not over five feet tall" makes itclear you dont mean the whole class, and specifies which subset you have in mind.

Setting a clause off by commas makes it a nonrestrictive clause. The commas signal that itapplies to the whole set, and therefore does not affect the meaning in any necessary way.

"Members of the sophomore class, who are not over five feet tall, cant see far in a crowd" hasquite a different meaning, as you learn by reading it without the clause: "members of thesophomore class cant see far in a crowd." All the clause does is give additional but not essentialinformation about the same set of people, asserting here that no sophomore is more than five feettall. But the sentence could still be true even if the clause were false.

There is a common error in using nonrestrictive clauses, namely forgetting one of the twocommas. "Members of the sophomore class who are not over five feet tall, cant see far in acrowd" is just plain c onfusing, since the reader cant tell which of the two kinds of clauses youhave in mind. If you find an unmatched comma as you edit, make sure you know why.

Second, most high-school teachers, overburdened as they are, never get round to teaching peoplehow to use colons and semicolons . Most students brave enough to use them improvise. Readersmay admire your ingenuity, but that doesn't mean they will understand you. That's why Irecommend avoiding them or learning them. If you want to learn them, it's not hard:

Colon. Colons introduce or call attention to what follows them. That's all they do. What followsthem can be
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(a) a list, e.g. "A meal should include at least three elements: appetizer, cooked or uncooked; amain course, with meat or vegetarian; and dessert, the bigger the better." If you are introducingthe list with "are," "such as," "consist of," etc., you don't need a colon. On lists, see item 10 .

(b) a clarification of some word or phrase that comes before the colon, e.g., "There are two kinds

of people: those who think there are two kinds of people and those who don't."

(c) a quotation, as in the next paragraph, or

(d) the body of a letter when the colon is used in the salutation.

Semicolon. Semicolons connect items of equal grammatical rank. Most of the time these itemsare sentences. Keep in mind that sentences should stay separate unless there is an intimateconnection.In order to understand the semicolon, you need to be aware of your options for joining twoclosely related sentences. One is to use a conjunction. For instance, "It's eleven o'clock, but I

don't feel like going home." That makes the relation between the two sentences crystal clear.Keep in mind two details: using "however" instead of "but" in a sentence like that doesn't work,and splicing two sentences together with "and" looks childish if you do it often, or if the two arenot really part of the flow of one idea (think about why I used "and" to assemble the lastsentence.)The semicolon works only when the relation is clear enough that you don't need a conjunction orany other word to clarify it. For instance, "there are thirty-six tactics applicable to ourpredicament; the superior one is to bug out." Using "and" between the two sentences would makethe connection flabby. Obviously semicolons need to be used with restraint, in fact rationed.

Finally, if you have a list of items with commas in them, you will need a semicolon to show the

separations between them; see the sentence in (a) above.Third, hyphenating compound adjectives. If you have a complex phrase a b c, you will want tomake sure the reader can tell how the three words group. "High profile poet" is confusing,because it could be about a poet in the news, or someone who writes poems about high profiles,or one who writes poems about profiles while smoking something illegal. "High-profile poet"resolves the ambiguity by signalling the reader that "high-profile" is a single adjective. Whenyou are editing and you see two nouns in a row, you may have a compound adjective that needs ahyphen.

You will also want to keep your eyes open while editing for a related problem. Once you have

learned to write "twentieth-century mentality," if you are writing while half asleep, you may findyourself saying "all this happened in the twentieth-century." This booboo is fairly common oncourse papers. If it ain't a compound adjective, don't hyphenate it. (Return to item eight )

9. Passive
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The most important application of the basic subject-verb-object categories is in understandingthe passive voice, probably the main cause of verbosity and sloppiness in academic writing.Passive is the opposite of active.

Speakers often make complex sentences (usually without thinking about it) by changing simple

ones. The passive voice is a trick that everyone knows but seldom knows they know. Thistransformation technique lets you move the object to the front of the sentence, where it will getthe emphasis, and either tuck the subject out of the way after the verb or even get rid of it. Whatyou do is (a) move the object before the verb, (b) change the verb to the passive voice, and (c)dispose of the subject or identify it with "by." "John ate dinner" becomes "The dinner [object thatreceives the action] was eaten [passive form of "eat"] by [used to mark the subject if any] John"and, one step further, "The dinner was eaten" [effectively hiding John's responsibility].

There are excellent reasons to use the passive: when the subject is irrelevant or needs to behidden, or when the object needs to be in the most prominent place. "The passive is used moreoften than it is thought about" makes its point, where the underlying active sentence might be

something like "thoughtless writers use the passive more often than they think about it." The firstversion politely avoids pointing the finger.

Here is part of an actual sentence from a draft that misuses the passive twice: " diseasemonographs on classes of disorders that were thought to be discussed insufficiently, butunderstood to be more prevalent in frontier regions, more common in the present than in the past,and inadequately understood in the available medical literature." Who thought that? Whounderstood that? Not a clue! Were the classes actually not discussed enough? Were they reallymore prevalent or not? That is precisely what the passive hides. Is the last clause part of what theconcealed person understood, or an added thought? Think about that, and try turning thisfragment of a long sentence into normal English. (Return to item nine )

10. Consistency in Lists

Editors use "lists" to mean any series of equivalent elements: "I have three coins: a dime, a nickel,and a quarter" or "I have three jobs to do today: finishing a paper for HSS 152, watching 'TheYoung and the Restless,' and reading 300 pages of Tolstoy." The point is that equivalent itemsneed to be in equivalent form. The verbs with "ing" take care of that. Otherwise the sentencebecomes incoherent: "I have three jobs to finish today, finishing a paper for HSS 152, to watch'The Young and the Restless,' and 300 pages of Tolstoy." As you edit your lists, ask whether theitems match in number (singular, plural) and form (verb phrases, nouns, etc.). (Return to item ten)

11. Number of Noun and Verb or Pronoun

The errors of this kind that confuse readers usually happen when authors lose track of what thesubject of the sentence is. In "the main reason, which has many components, are complex" theverb agrees with the nearest noun, not the main one of the sentence. It doesn't make sense,because the main verb is tied to a noun that is not even essential to the meaning of the sentence(it is in a nonrestrictive clause).
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As for nouns and pronouns, in "when you give something to someone you expect them to begrateful," note the shift from "someone," a singular noun, to "them," a plural pronoun that has tostand for a plural noun.

Some related issues: If you don't want to write "he or she," make the whole shebang plural.

Slashes are bureaucratese. Unless you say "he slash she," write "he or she," not "he/she.""And/or" is meant to dump the choice of "and" or "or" into the reader's lap. Writers who careabout clarity choose "and" or "or." In formal logic the two may be mutually exclusive, but in theEnglish written language either word is flexible enough to leave open the possibility of the other."I would like some milk or juice" does not rule out having both. Finally, since you don't say "hegave it to I," you can't say "He gave it to Bill and I." (Return to item eleven )

12. Spelling

If you didn't learn to spell in high school, it was because your school had to, or wanted to, savemoney. It wasn't because people don't care whether you can spell. They care whether they canunderstand you, and wrong spelling often makes that impossible. It also wasn't because all youwill ever need is a spelling checker. Your spelling checker is an unintelligent list of words. Itwon't catch problems as simple as "that's to bad." There is also a larger problem: people whonever learned to spell generally don't have a large enough active vocabulary to write with forceand precision.

Well, what is the moral of this? If your high school left you hopeless at spelling, are you doomedto semi-literacy? Hardly. The purpose of higher education is to prepare you to learn anything youwant to learn for the rest of your life without taking courses. Instead of lamenting your bad

fortune, learn to spell now.The secret is to have a good dictionary, and to use it. You have a great many to choose from.Most people buy one without much thought, and tend to have inadequate ones. There is no pointin having a 15-pound dictionary if you will hesitate to use it. It is even worse to have a small onethat has all the words you already know, and not enough of those you don't. That is why mostpaperback dictionaries are bad investments. If you are a college or graduate student, you willwant one labeled "college edition," which is the largest portable version of a given title.

There are a several excellent dictionaries, on paper, on disk, and online. I use the Webster's NewWorld Dictionary of the American Language, College Edition. It reflects current usage, and

shows how to choose between words with similar meanings. I have it installed on my hard disk,and I have a copy on my bookshelf to use when my computer is off.

You will also want to know about the Oxford English Dictionary, the most comprehensivedictionary in English. It lists every sense of every word from early medieval English to thepresent day, with the earliest known sentence that uses each sense. This prodigy of scholarship isthe equivalent of at least 25 normal volumes, but you don't have to buy it (although you can). If
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you are a student or faculty member, you can access it via the Penn Library's web site. You won'tneed it to check spelling, but it is wonderful for increasing your grasp of language.

(Return to item twelve )

13. Proofreading

Proofreading can be an extremely inefficient process unless you are doing it attentively andreflectively. Try to set your draft aside for a day or so before doing the final editing andproofreading, so that you can look at it with a fresh eye. Find a place where nothing will distractyou. On the other hand, don't wait until the last moment, when you are under so much stress thatit is difficult to concentrate.

(Return to item thirteen )

14. Printing

By the time you print out the final version, your paper ought to be your best say on your topic,thoughtful, interesting and informative, carefully edited and proofread. It ought also to be easilyreadable, with pages numbered so the reader can reassemble it if it comes apart. If you needguidelines to help with the layout, get a style sheet for your major or discipline from yourdepartment, or check the main journal in your field to see which style it prescribes. If there isnone, ask me for a copy of my simple and minimal "Guide to Style," which can be used for anypaper.

By the way, printing may be an unnecessary step. If you don't have ready access to a printer thatwill produce clear copy from your file, or if your printer breaks down half an hour before the

deadline for a paper, it will be worth your while to know whether the instructor accepts papers inelectronic form. I do, and can handle them in almost any PC format, and in Macintosh Wordformat. It is generally easier to deal with files sent as attachments to email messages than withthose submitted on floppy disks, but either will do. If you are coping with a catastrophe, you mayfind it possible to save the file to the Windows clipboard as plain text and paste it into the bodyof an email message.

A final suggestion about computer catastrophes: An almost universal experience is to have a filedisappear into the void, to accidentally erase it, or to destroy a whole folder or even hard disk without meaning to. It will happen to you sooner or later. You can prevent disastrous losses bybacking up your work. You can set your word processor to back up your file every 5 minutes.

But since every computer breaks down sooner or later, and theft is not rare, you will also want tosave copies on a removable medium.

The simplest way is, just before you close down for the night, to copy to a floppy disk the filesyou created or changed that day. That takes less than a minute. The techies' rule of thumb is thatnot keeping a given file on two separate media is the same as praying to lose it. People whocan't get their heads together to back up daily do have one recourse if a file disappears. The file isstill there, somewhere, even if you have erased it! Stop working on that computer right away
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and contact someone who knows how to recover erased files and directories. Only if youcontinue working will you destroy it. You may have the knowledge (e.g., of the Recycle Bin)and software (e.g., the Norton Utilities) you need. If not, get in touch with the ComputerResources Center or your local guru.

a checklist for editing

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