| Revision report for week 13 | |
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BEFORE CLASS With the benefit of revision reports #1 and #2, you should be proceeding on your revising your rough draft into final form. 1. Your introductory section should have: general historical background/context, specific stakes for people in the past (what were they striving to add into the world?), your main analytical themes (e.g., masculinity, memory, law, war, social reform, et cetera), a sense of your primary sources, and your overarching analytical argument (thesis statement) which will hold together your entire paper as an original contribution to our historical understanding (i.e., not already covered by an historian). 2. Your bibliography should be broken down into primary and secondary sources. Do you have sufficient primary sources to provide evidence for your analytical argument? Do you have sufficient secondary sources to provide context and background? What more do you need to tighten up your rough draft? 3. Outlining your rough draft paragraph by paragraph should have revealed what you need to revise in terms of the organizational flow across your paper (is everything in the right order? does each section and paragraph have the right weight to it?), the evidence and the analysis in each paragraph, and the persuasiveness of the overarching analytical argument (i.e., your paper reduced to one encapsulating sentence). 4. As you revisit your paragraphs, take note of the topic sentence, which should convey the main analytical point of the paragraph, and how it fits into your overarching argument. Topic sentences are a great guide for your reader — and they are a great guide for you in revising your paper. The lesson here is not only to be an effective writer, but also to be an effective editor of your own writing. 5. Beyond your main priorities for your paper (organization, evidence, analysis), there are also the details. Make sure you do not assume knowledge in your reader. Make sure you anchor each paragraph in a chronology and geography: time and place. Make sure you identify who people were, what institutions were, what events were, et cetera. 6. Whenever you attribute motivations or evaluations, or any subjectivity or ideology, to your historical actors, you must provide evidence of that motivation or evaluation from the primary sources. 7. At this point, you should have revisited your outline and thoroughly strategized about your revision, both highest priorities and crucial details. You should be resuming writing, as revising — done properly — takes a good while. It does not amount to 10 percent of the work of paper, but more like 40 percent. 8. Keep track of your revisions, because you will be preparing and submitting a statement of revisions with the final draft of your paper. 9. Finally, your updated workplan for weeks 14 through 17, when the final paper is due. |