Prof. Brian Koster Unit 8 Seminar

Welcome! Any questions from Unit 7?

Make-Up Work Deadline Remember that ALL make-up work MUST be turned in by the deadline. NO work will be turned in late. That includes the final project.

Paper Review Service Kaplan University professors will assess your writing and provide feedback within 48 hours. This essay submission service is offered to provide suggestions for writing improvement, especially in terms of grammar, mechanics and organization. Rather than editing or rewriting your paper, tutors will provide you with a better understanding of areas that need improvement or development. For further writing assistance, such as help with APA formatting and citation, please use the reference library and/or speak with a live tutor.

Paper Review Service Before submitting your work, please note: This service does not guarantee higher grades; grades on projects are strictly the domain of your Kaplan University professor. Use the comments you receive from the Paper Review Service to create a better draft of your project. Papers must be submitted as an attached Word.doc,.docx, or.rtf file. Failure to do this will delay timely feedback.

Paper Review Service You must provide your name, address, and course and section number with every submission. Please include only one project per request. If you have more than one paper to be reviewed, please compose a separate for each. While all other resources offered by the Writing Center are unlimited, students are allowed to submit five projects per term for review by our tutors.

Paper Review Service To submit a paper for review, please attach it to an message and send it from your Kaplan account to

Revising Your Work Revising involves reviewing the document and evaluating the following:

Revising Your Work Clarity of purpose: does your essay achieve your goal? Completeness: does your essay have a beginning, middle and end? Does it include all of the information it needs? Organization of ideas: is your essay logically organized? Paragraph structure and development: does each paragraph fully develop one main idea and provide sufficient support?

Revising Your Work Expression/sentence structure and variety: are your sentences well-formed? Is your sentence structure varied (Do you mix complex or compound-complex sentences with simple and compound sentences?) Language choices: is your diction appropriate for your subject matter and tone? Since this is a professional autobiography, using slang and other informal language will not be effective.

Revising Your Work Coherence (flow of ideas): does your paper flow well or does it feel awkward? If it does feel awkward, can you isolate these areas and zero in on how to solve them? Unity of the document (structure of introduction, body, and conclusion): does each part of your paper lead logically to the other? Think about your usage of transitional sentences to function as links between paragraphs and smoothly guide readers along.

Revising Your Work Presentation/format: have you applied standard formatting such as page numbers, etc? Have you carefully proofread a final time to eliminate typos, missing words, etc.?

Revising Your Work Revising calls for you to do four activities: add, cut, move, delete. When you have added details and information where needed, cut portions that were off topic, moved portions that were out of order and replaced sections that were not very clear, you are ready to finally edit. Note that revision is not concerned with grammar or spelling.

Revising Your Work Revision means (in the Latin) actually rewriting your paper. Students often try to draft and revise their papers at the same time, which only causes confusion because they are forcing their left and right sides of the brain to work at the same time; eventually one will rule out, and usually it is the critical side of the brain. Doing this stifles creativity.

Revising Your Work True revision is where the real writing begins. Anyone can write a paper, but it takes a writer to be able to revise his or her own work. This is the longest step in writing because revision can take as few as two drafts or seemingly forever. It ends when the writer is pleased with the product or when he or she meets a deadline.

Revising Your Work It is also important to mention that good writers rarely scratch anything out or throw anything away. Revisions are made overtop of the original draft, leaving the original writing visible. Often writers will revise a passage and then feel that it was actually better the first time they wrote it.

Revising Your Work If the writer has thrown it away or erased it, this is not possible. Think for a minute: have you ever lost a paper or letter and had to rewrite it? Somehow we never feel like we really recaptured what we had done the first time, like the second copy is just not as good. There are good ideas and not so good ideas, but there are never ideas so unworthy as to be erased or trashed.

Revising Your Work After all that revising… At this point you should be happy with the content of your paper and would do nothing to change it.

Submitting to the Writing Center If you haven’t already submitted your draft to the Writing Center for review, you need to do that as soon as possible.

Unit 8 Project When you get the feedback from the Writing Center, you will turn in that feedback as your Unit 8 project. Please submit your project as soon as you get the feedback from the Writing Center. Your feedback may come as a Word document or a.pdf (opened in Adobe Acrobat Reader). Either way is fine.

Unit 8 Assignments The following assignments are due by 11:59pm ET on Tuesday: 1. Seminar (we are almost done) 2. Discussion (reply to the Discussion topic and at least two classmate replies) 3. Unit 8 Quiz 4. Unit 8 Project (turned in to the Dropbox as a Microsoft Word or Adobe Acrobat Reader file attachment)

Questions? Any questions before we wrap-up tonight’s seminar?