Factors to consider when bidding for a contract

Your ending is almost always as important as your beginning. An effective conclusion does more than end your essay; it wraps up your thoughts and leaves readers satisfied with the presentation of your ideas and information. Your ending should be a natural outgrowth of the development of your ideas. Avoid trick endings, mechanical summaries, and cutesy comments, and never introduce new concepts or information in the ending. Just as with the writing of titles, the writing of beginnings and endings is perhaps best done by generating several alternatives and then selecting from among them. Review the Questions for Beginnings and Endings box and see Chapter 6 for more help developing your beginnings and endings.

Questions for Beginnings and Endings

1. Does my introduction grab the reader’s attention?

2. Is my introduction confusing in any way? How well does it relate to the rest of the essay?

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3. If I state my thesis in the introduction, how effectively is it presented?

4. Does my essay come to a logical conclusion, or does it just stop short?

5. How well does the conclusion relate to the rest of the essay? Am I careful not to introduce new topics or issues that I did not address in the body of the essay?

6. Does the conclusion help underscore or illuminate important aspects of the body of the essay, or is it just another version of what I wrote earlier?

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Revising After you have completed a first draft, set it aside for a few hours or even until the next day. Removed from the process of drafting, you can approach the revision of your draft with a clear mind. When you revise, consider the most important elements of your draft first. You should focus on your thesis, purpose, content, organization, and paragraph structure. You will have a chance to look at grammar, punctuation, and mechanics after you revise. This way you will make sure that your essay is fundamentally solid and says what you want it to say before dealing with the task of editing.

It is helpful to have someone — a friend or a member of your writing class — listen to your essay as you read it aloud. The process of reading aloud allows you to determine if your writing sounds clear and natural. If you have to alter your voice to provide emphasis, try rephrasing the idea to make it clearer. Whether you revise your work on your own or have someone assist you, the questions in the Questions for Revising box above will help you focus on the largest, most important elements of your essay early in the revision process.

Questions for Revising

1. Have I focused on my topic?

2. Does my thesis make a clear statement about my topic?

3. Is the organizational pattern I have used the best one, given my purpose?

4. Does the topic sentence of each paragraph relate to my thesis? Does each paragraph support its topic sentence?

5. Do I have enough supporting details, and are my examples the best ones that I can develop?

6. How effective are my beginning and my ending? Can I improve them?

7. Do I have a good title? Does it indicate what my subject is and hint at my thesis?

For more practice, visit the LaunchPad for Models for Writers: LearningCurve > Supporting Details

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http://www.macmillanhighered.com/launchpad/models13e
Editing When you are sure you have communicated clearly what you want to say and you have done considerable work drafting and revising, you will want your work to be as accurate as possible. Editing is different from revising in that your focus is on correctness. It is also different from proofreading for careless errors in the final preparation of your essay, which we will discuss later in this chapter (pp. 28–29). During the editing stage, you check your writing for errors in grammar, punctuation, mechanics, spelling, usage, and sentence style. If your writing has editing errors, your readers may question the authority you are trying to establish as a writer — and perhaps then question your content.

You may have difficulty identifying editing errors because they are not easy to spot and take time to learn. After all, if they were easy to see, you would probably have identified and corrected them in the process of drafting and revision. For example, perhaps you forgot or were never made aware of the fact that the word irregardless is redundant, unacceptable usage and should be avoided. Or maybe you didn’t notice that you created a nonparallel construction in one of your sentences:

INCORRECT The scientists’ typical pattern of behavior was to question, to probe, and research.

CORRECT The scientists’ typical pattern of behavior was to question, to probe, and to research.