Your goal today should be to improve your Research Project Position Paper as much as possible stylistically. To that end, you must come to class with a complete draft of the essay. Then, you will work on several areas: effective use of punctuation, word choice, concision, and grammatical correctness.

Step I

Open your essay. Save it under a slightly modified file-name.

Make as many stylistic improvements to the essay as you can. These can include including adding, changing, or removing punctuation, substituting one word or phrase for another to improve clarity, and eliminating wordiness. Use the Writing Center’s guides to punctuation, and my Advice on Cutting Words and Incredibly Annoying Error List documents on the website to help you.

Step II

Save your file. Now, use the “Compare Versions” function to create a composite document of the version you began with and the revision.

Where the text of your document ends, list what you think are the three most important kinds of changes you have made.

Save the document without accepting or rejecting any changes and e-mail it to me at rnanian@gmu.edu before you leave class.

As a general rule, the more changes you make, the better.

When you choose your three most important changes, your criterion should be the effect you believe each type of change has on your overall clarity and persuasiveness.

Note that any single type of correction — removing adverbial intensifiers, for example, or eliminating incorrect use of semicolons — counts as one change, even if you do it six times.

The essay must fulfill the requirements of that assignment. The changes you make must reflect the stylisitic instruction in the class and be reasonably plentiful.

When you have completed the exercise, e-mail me the document directly at rnanian@gmu.edu. You must submit the document before leaving class to get credit.