Tips to Master the Writing Process
Presented Wednesday October 18, 2017
Last updated 11/07/2017
Visual: Presentation opens with title slide "Tips to Master the Writing Process."
Audio: Instrumental music
Visual: Slide changes to "Introductions" and includes the names, qualifications and images of the presenters.
Audio: Brenda: Yes, great. We're really glad you're here. Thanks for taking the time to attend our webinar. I want to tell you a little bit about how we'll be spending our time together first. We're excited to take you through our tips in mastering the writing process.
Visual: Slide changes to "Agenda" and includes the topics that will be discussed during the presentation.
Audio: Brenda: So our agenda is to first introduce you to the writing process itself. The concept and the steps involved, and then you'll have a chance to put the writing process to practice. We're going to have you do two back to back hands on writing activities, so we're really excited that you'll be participating in this webinar. When we get to the writing activities, you can do that in whatever way works for you, whatever way you'd like, so you can use old school pen and paper or you can type on your computer. It's up to you how you complete the writing activities. And then after each writing activity we'll check in with you and ask for your thoughts and reactions, so feel free to chime in in the chat box for that. We'll really looking forward to your participation so hope you won't be too shy. We'll also provide additional resources to advance your writing practice, and I'm sorry, I meant to -- there's your agenda. Sorry. We'll provide additional resources to help you advance your writing practice and we'll be sure to answer your questions both at the end and throughout the webinar. If you do have questions, feel free to use the questions box that Shawna mentioned.
Visual: Slide changes "A quick poll" and includes a poll.
Audio: Brenda: So with that let's get started. First we'd like your input. We want to have a quick poll which I think Shawna is going to launch here momentarily. We want to know what you find most difficult about scholarly writing, so you'll see there's a range of options in our poll. Please take the next few moments to select those items you find most difficult about your own scholarly writing, and you can choose as many as are relevant to you, likely more than one will speak to you. And if there's not something that's on our poll, feel free to add that in the chat box, so I'll give you a few moments to fill this out.
So interesting as I see you filling them out knowing where to start, getting started is a big one. Not surprisingly. Staring at the blank page or starting a new section of a big project can be really overwhelming like knowing where to begin. Let's see. Some other big ones are following APA guidelines, yes, those -- there are a lot of guidelines to follow, even those of us who are APA experts who have spent many years editing for APA style, I think everyone would say we always learn new APA rules and guidelines even though we've been at it for a long time, so it's not surprising that that might be overwhelming to you. And then writing in a scholarly tone, definitely is something that can come with more practice, so it's a particular way of writing, and yeah, we need to find our voice, what is our scholarly tone. And I noticed in the chat box someone was saying that, yes, APA is stressful, explaining meaningful and social change, yes. So that's another one where you really have to think about how your research is being applied for social change, so something that you may have to reflect on. And then specifically for APA graphs and tables.
So it's interesting that everybody seems to -- that all of these things are issues in scholarly writing for you, and I'm sure many of you have more than one, so I think what you'll find helpful in this webinar is we'll touch on ways that the writing process can help you address all these different issues, and also I do want to just say I think my copresenters would agree that you're not alone, and just knowing that that you're not the only one struggling with some of these issues can be helpful I think. So thank you for participating in that. I am going to move this along now to Dr. Gredler and I'll just say bare bare your particular writing challenges in mind as Dr. Gredler introduces you to the writing process.
Visual: Slide changes "Writing Process: Introduction" and includes a graphic image flow chart.
Audio: Joe: Thanks, Brenda. I'm just waiting for the next slide to load. There we go. One of the mistakes students often make is focusing too much attention on the finished product and not embracing writing as a process and this can lead to all sorts of problems like writer's block and fear of the writing process and other things and I noted in the poll that most of you reported getting started to be one of the significant problems that you have, and so embracing writing as a process should help you overcome any fears you might have and should help you move along and get your writing juices flowing.
Most of the work you do as scholars will be some reaction to the literature and so responding to previously published materials will be a great way for you to overcome writer's block. You may be asked in courses to summarize an article, to compare and contrast two empirical studies, to analyze critically an article for problems with methodology or external, internal validity issues, something like that. You may be asked at the doctoral stage to synthesize the literature by looking at 40 or 50 different articles and condensing into a good solid literature review. Most of the work you do as writers will be in response to previously written material and this is good because you'll have something to read and something to get your juices flowing as writers.
So the second stage in the process is organizing, and this involves putting together the skeleton of your paper. We'll talk about this more in the next slide, but starting with the course paper template if you're in a course or the capstone template if you're working on your doctoral study it's very important so you can ensure proper APA formatting. You can also do some outlining at this point. You can take notes when you're reading and do all sorts of other things to get yourself ready for starting that first draft. So if you lay the foundation for the writing process properly by reading carefully, taking notes, putting together an outline, setting up your course paper template, then you'll be able to sit down and write your paper in more digestible chunks by focusing on the more specific parts of the paper that needs to be done.
Revision is an underappreciated part of the writing process. Many students do not allow enough time by starting their drafting too late in the week if something is due Sunday night by starting the writing process on Sunday instead of Saturday or even Friday and not allowing enough time for revision, which is very, very important. And then the final stage is proofing and submitting for instructor review and then you will also reflect on what you have received by way of feedback from your instructors and this will be an important way for you to improve your scholarly style, to learn more about APA formatting, and to apply all the feedback that you will have received to upcoming course papers and the cumulative feedback process will help you become stronger scholarly writers. Okay.
Visual: Slide changes to "Writing Process: Prewriting" and includes a graphic image flow chart and bullet points about the prewriting process.
Audio: Joe: Let's focus a little bit more on the prewriting process. As I stated on the previous slide, most of the writing you will do will be in response to the literature. And so you'll need to read actively. If you like to read electronically there are some great tools out there. The Adobe reader allows you to read PDFs and highlight texts. You can also insert comment bubbles directly in the text. If you like to do the old school printout and read on hard copy, that's fine, do whatever works for you in the prewriting stage of the writing process. It's very important to use templates. The course paper template is dialed in for APA style so you won't have to worry about page margins, pagination, proper headings and things like that if you follow the template so I encourage everyone to start with the template and use that as the skeleton when you're getting where had to write your paper.
Very often especially in courses there will be two, three, four, maybe five prompts, bulleted prompts in the assignment that you can use to convert directly into headings for your paper, so before you even begin writing a word you can put together the skeleton of your paper by following the template, by reading the assignment instructions carefully and creating headings that will allow you to write specific sections one by one and that will make the process seem less daunting and more manageable as you think about specific sections to write which may involve only a paragraph or two at a time.
Make sure to do your best to follow APA styles. Everyone struggles with this especially at the beginning. Walden has tremendous resources to help you get better at the APA style and please be sure to study your instructor's feedback and use all of the tools at your disposal including Grammarly. I'll just check the chat box for any questions. Yeah, to me just about everyone has citation problems at the beginning. No worries. Try to study the instructor's feedback and go back to the APA manual whenever you can, make it your new best friend, put it under your pillow, use sticky notes to flag important sections that you're going to be using all the time for example APA 6.11 and 6.12 you'll go to over and over again to learn about proper citation formatting.
Okay. We'll move on to Dr. Marshall who will address the drafting and revising stages.
Visual: Slide changes to "Writing Process: Drafting and Revising" and includes a flow chart image and bullet points about drafting a paper.
Audio: Heidi: Great. Thank you. And hello everyone. I really enjoyed following our discussion in the the chat box so those of you on the presentation if you are not paying attention to the chat box I really recommend you take a look at the conversation that's happening there as well. We've had some great questions, and just sharing experiences that they've had with this process so far and actually much of what we're talking about in that chat box relates to this particular topic of drafting and revising.
My role, one of my roles here at what Walden is to teach our graduate writing one and two courses. I've been doing that for you for a number of years and those courses are structured such that students actually are working on the same assignment for all -- for about six weeks which might seem a little bit redundant and tedious and certainly I think it can be, but part of our goal for those courses is to help students understands that often the writing process is a bit tedious, much more so than we tend to think when we first come into it. You might have found in your previous academic programs or in any writing that you do in your day-to-day lives that you can maybe write a first draft, give it a quick lookover for any glaring errors, typos, grammatical or spelling errors and be done with T you send it off to where it might need to go and maybe that's gotten you through your academics to date but I would say now that you're at this stage of your writing and particularly as you get towards your capstone writing that we want to move away from that style of approaching writing.
Our first bullet point is to write a rough draft. What I like to tell students is you really need to embrace what I call the crummy first draft. You need to accept that whatever first draft you write is probably not going to be good and that's okay. Even the best writers. Steven king, those folks, they talk about in their writing they would never share their first draft with anybody bought it's not good. They're fantastic writers but often our first draft isn't good because it's a way of almost thinking out loud on the page so you may not have a lot of organization. You may have a lot of typos and grammar errors and that kind of thing but don't be hung up on that. Just write that first draft because good writing happens in the revision process.
So after you get that first draft you want to make sure one you're using a rubric so if you are not in the habit of looking at the rubric by which your assignment will be graded you want to make sure you do that so before you create a final draft for your paper that you've read that rubric and you're addressing all those key areas in your paper. And that you're revising for clarity, prevision, logical development, APA and so forth.
One thing that I recommend students do is to create a checklist for revision, so what you want to do is say, okay, I've gotten feedback so I know Erica and Kathy were just talking in the chat box a little bit ago about feedback sometimes being a little bit different from instructor to instructor. So one thing I do is when you're in a class to create a general checklist for revision for your writing. So if you know you struggle with APA citation that one of the first things you're going to look for after you write that first draft is to make sure your citations are correct. You might struggle with activity versus the passive voice so that is going to be something you want to put on your checklist. Make sure you're looking for the active voice. You're going to develop and as you receive more and more feedback on your writing on your checklist and you might need to tweak that checklist from class to class.
You might find that some instructors are picky about particular APA rules. So you might want to pay a bit more attention to those specific things so that you're not losing points on your assignment. I also want to point out, too, although very few of you indicated that you had trouble incorporating feedback if your writing when we took that poll at the beginning, that it can sometimes be difficult to do so because we have an attachment to our writing. We sort of become emotionally attached to it. We spend a lot of time researching, writing, going through the drafting process so when we get feedback sometimes we get a little defensive about that. So my recommendation to you is as much as possible try not to do that, kind of separate yourself from your writing and just remember any feedback you get is with the intention of making you a better writer but it speaks nothing to your quality as a scholar practitioner, as a student. It's really just about that writing.
So I'm going to move on. So after you go through this drafting process, so again the main point that we want to reiterate here is that good writing doesn't happen in that first draft. You just need to get that first draft out and the good writing happens during the revision process. But eventually you do need to have a final draft.
Visual: Slide changes to "Writing Process: Final Draft" and include a flow chart image and bullet points on the tools for creating a final draft.
Audio: Heidi: At some point you just need to say I need to get this assignment in on time so I have to have this final draft.
There are some really key points you can take before submitting that final draft. One is visit the Writing Center. We have a wealth of resources in the Walden Writing Center including tutors. One technique particularly if you don't have a chance to get into the Writing Center is to read your paper out loud. Our ears are -- tend to be better at picking up writing errors than our eyes. When we read our own writing we tends to skim over our writing errors so if you read it out loud you're more likely to catch it in your own writing. Also resources like Grammarly. And Grammer checking can be a tool to help you in one of those steps in the revision process. The safe assign link in your class you make sure you're not inadvertently leaving out citation when you read it and make sure you proofread multiple times. I also recommend if you have a colleague a coworker a peer someone in your family you trust that you can send them your paper as well for an extra set of eyes on that.
I think one thing we want to take away from this process is it all takes time. You certainly can't at 8 a.m. expect to go through each of these steps for creating a final draft. You want to have a few days. So you want to make sure the crummy first draft we talked about is something you do early on in the week so you have enough time for that process as the week goes on and as you're looking writing those longer manuscripts for your capstone that you're thinking about this in terms of weeks. If you want to get through a particular section, let's say in three weeks, that you're looking to write that first draft in week one so you have a few weeks to go through. So obviously the longer the document is the more time you need for each of these steps in the process.
I want to leave you with just one more thing before I turn it back over to Brenda is that you want to be honest with yourself about your writing. So even if you are receiving good grades on your writing, you want to remember that in your content classes your main class your course classes for your program your instructor are primarily focused on your content knowledge. They want to know that you're learning the subject matter. So you may have instructors that don't pay as close attention to grammar and APA but you don't want to ignore them in your writing, so you want to, again, be honest with yourself. And don't necessarily use your grades as the sole reflection of where you are with your writing. So you want to make sure you're paying attention and following each of these steps. All right. I'm just looking over in the chat box. Brenda or Joe, are there any questions that popped up?
Visual: Slide changes to "Writing Process: Reflecting" and includes a flow chart image and a note that it is important to reflect throughout the writing process.
Audio: Brenda: Excuse me. I think we're good. If anyone has a question we didn't get to, let us know there. So I will carry on with our stage of reflecting in the writing process. So I know we have it as it looks like it's the final stage but it really should be something that you're doing throughout your writing process, and what do I mean by reflecting. So there's just a number of techniques that you can use for reflecting on what's going on with your writing and with the content in your writing process, so one way is to ask yourself questions. You might be asking yourself questions about what you're reading as you're reading other scholarly work. One question that I bet you're doing all the way through is how does this pertain to my study or to the homework -- or to the assignment in question, so as you're reading others' work you're asking questions about what you're reading, being -- reading critically as Dr. Gredler mentioned earlier.
And then as you go along, too, think about how you're organizing your work. Maybe even as you're having -- going through your different drafts, as you're revising always just maybe take another look at what your headings are. Do you need to revise your headings based on additional research and writing that you're doing. Sometimes you may have to tweak it as you go along and so just being aware and asking yourself questions about your writing as you go is a great way to see what needs to be done. Also when rereading your rough draft, consider if there's any gaps or inconsistencies in what you're saying. If there's lack of clarity in your writing, you're just looking for things that's going on with your writing, looking for what you need to do to improve your writing, improve the clarity of your message. And you can use your reflections to help guide your multiple revisions. You know, we had talked earlier how revising is sometimes left to the last minute or not appreciated as much. So just know that you will be revising your draft to make them stronger. It's a great -- reflecting on what you've written is a great way to help guide your writing.
So again you'll take time to reflect on your final draft as well. Heidi already mentioned a number of ways you might reflect by reading your work out loud or having other people read your work so getting their feedback on that and listening to your work. The other thing I'll say, you might use reflections not only to guide the content, but also to pay attention to your own writing process. What works for you and what doesn't. Maybe you already know that you're a morning person and that you're most productive in your writing in the morning. If so, pay attention to that and work that into your schedule. Or maybe you just haven't paid any attention to that whatsoever, so be curious about your writing, not just with what you're writing, the content, but how you're writing, and sometimes knowing what doesn't work can be useful too so that you can take that into -- take that into consideration.
So just as a good scholar, always being curious is a good thing and reflecting throughout the process on your writing, what you're writing and how you're writing I think will serve you really well. So before I move on, I just wanted to see if there were any questions about the writing process before we move on to your first writing activity. And I see that there is activity in the chat box, but I don't know if there's any outstanding questions about the writing process. Let me just check quick.
Visual: Slide changes to "Writing Activity #1" and gives a prompt for the activity.
Audio: Brenda: Okay. I think we will move on to the first writing assignment then. And don't be worried. For this activity I want -- you're going to spend five minutes, just five minutes writing, and you're going to respond to the prompt, what does social change mean to me. Okay. And the only instructions you have are to write quickly and without stopping or editing yourself and so what that might mean if you're using pen and paper and you're not quite sure how to get going it doesn't matter what you're writing, just keep your pen moving across the page or if you're typing, just keep going with those keys. But keep going and don't edit yourself, just write what comes to you. I'll be monitoring the time so don't worry about how much time you have left. I'll give you a heads up when you have about 30 seconds left. So get ready to write. Get your pen and paper out or open up a document to write on your computer, and I'll let you know when time is up, and then we'll regroup. So it will be quiet for about five minutes, and go ahead. [Writing activity] Okay. We have about 30 seconds left so work on finishing up the thought that you're on.
Okay. And that was five minutes, everyone. So I'd like to open it up for discussion on the chat box. Wondering anything you want to share, how did it go? How did it feel to write for five minutes straight? Hopefully without stopping or editing yourself. Were you able to do that? Any thoughts on how this experience fit in the writing process, so yeah, someone was saying without realizing it wrote more than a paragraph, and I think this instruction to write without stopping or editing yourself is certainly in the beginning stages of creating content is really helpful because your internal editor doesn't get a chance to weigh in and you can always go back and revise, but getting words down on paper or on the screen is such a crucial part of the writing process.
It's easier to edit when there's something to edit rather than staring at that blank page. Wow, there's lots of activity so let me see what else people are saying. Yeah, getting the first words down is hardest. And likening it to brainstorming, yes, exactly. That's great. And again with brainstorming, too, you don't edit yourself. You just put down what's on the paper -- or what's in your mind, and then go from there. And others say it's different because you're used to editing and spell checking as you go.
Yeah, I'm glad you were able to give this a try and see how different it is, and as Dr. Marshall mentioned with the first draft this isn't something that you would necessarily share with someone. You're not ready to hand it into your instructor or your chair, but it gets you on the way there.
Yeah, and I know, instinct is to edit as we go along because we want it to be perfect, don't we? But really encourage you as everyone is -- our copresenters are echoing don't bother editing the first draft yet. So never knowing where to start a new paragraph so sometimes if you write down what's on your mind and then when you go back to it, if you go back to what you've written, looking for main topic ideas, you know, maybe you've written two pages certainly not in any kind of paragraph format, but when you go back if you have a highlighter, for instance, and you look for what main ideas are jumping out at you, you can highlight those and then revise with a more formal paragraph structure in mind, and there are certainly learning resources out there for paragraph structure, for instance, the MEAL plan which maybe we can plug, provide a link to is very helpful. And then others are wondering about APA style when writing. I think that too can come adhering to APA maybe will be in one of the revision stages. Yep, as Dr. Gredler said, work on APA stuff when editing, yeah. So great. I'm glad you were able to give this a try and thanks for sharing your reactions and your insight about doing this activity. I'm going to hand it over to Dr. Gredler for our next stage and just bear in mind what you've done here as you move on.
Visual: Slide changes "Writing Activity #2" and includes prompt to revise.
Audio: Joe: Revision, the great under appreciated part of the writing process. The one point I wanted to make some response to all of the comments in the chat box is try not to do too many jobs at once. When you're writing just write. As you just experienced you can get more out if you think about the ideas and let them flow out. Get something down on paper. Accept the fact it's going to need to be tweaked. Just get some stuff out there so you can work on it later. Ideally it's great to allow some time, preferably a couple of hours, overnight if you can between the drafting and revisions stages so that you can bring fresh eyes to the table or the screen and react like a reader rather than a writer.
And this is important because you need to have some objective distance between what you were producing as a writer and what you're editing as a reader and this distance will allow you to focus on things like APA style, grammar, punctuation, spelling all the important mechanics that go into crafting effective scholarly writing. You won't have a lot of time in this particular activity unfortunately, but try to allow some time in between drafting and revising so as I had you can bring fresh eyes to the table.
So having said all of that, go back to the paragraphs you've written. Some of you have produced more than one. That's great. And look at some overall paragraph structure. Do the sentence follow logically? If not move some things around. Be sure to read aloud. This might seem weird but if you've got a quiet space to work in you can read aloud. You can often hear things better grammatical and awkward better than you can see them if you're reading on screen. Try to pay attention to unnecessary word choice. Get rid of whatever does not appear to be necessary. One of the APA mantras is less is more. Be clear and concise and to the point when you're writing and for a scholarly audience. Pay attention to grammar and APA as best you can. We will not expect you to have cited any sources in this short writing activity, but if you were able to do so, great. And do your best to format those citations properly. So let's do this over the next five minutes or so, and we'll come back together at 10:45 to talk about what you did.
Okay, everybody, please wrap up in the next 30 seconds or so, and we'll talk about the work that you did. Okay. Before we review the comments in the chat box, let's talk some more about the revision and editing process. I made a distinction between those two jobs in my chat response. When you revise you typically focus on macro issues such as content, paragraph structure, narrative flow, and when you edit and proofread you zoom in and focus on micro issues such as grammar, punctuation, spelling, capitalization, APA style, very important things that need attention and I encouraged you earlier to try not to do too many jobs at once. Earlier in the presentation we encouraged you if you have an assignment due by Sunday night to try to have your first draft generated by Thursday or Friday at the latest. I know this is going to be really tough for many of you who are working full-time, have families and generally have busy lifestyles but do your best to do your reading and prewriting and drafting during the week so you can allow your draft to sit overnight, Friday night or Saturday night at the latest and you can wake up with fresh eyes to revise and edit.
As Dr. Marshall mentioned earlier good writing appears in the editing process. Even accomplished writers struggle to produce polished drafts right off the bat. Writing is rewriting and the more you can embrace that process, the better off you'll be in your degree programs.
Okay. So let's talk about some of the things that you noticed when you went back to look at what you had done. Did it make sense? Were your sentences following each other logically? Were you generally impressed? How did it go. Let's review some of the comments in the chat.
When I was going through my degree programs as I mentioned earlier I tried to have drafts done by Friday and I got up Saturday and revised. I ran my documents through TurnItIn which he were using at the time. Safe assign is now the preferred plagiarism detection software, and I generally did that on Saturday during the revision process. I also took a look at the assignment rubric to make sure I was meet all expectations. I took a look at the assignment instructions, make sure all of the bulleted prompts had been addressed. I took a look at formatting to make sure that I had a proper title page and page margins were correct, everything was double spaced, all the things you'll need to do. It's better to focus on these things separately from the drafting process so you're not trying to write and revise and format and edit and proof all at the same time, which usually results in none of those jobs getting done effectively. If you can separate them and focus on them individually you'll do a much better job and you'll effectively embrace the write process as we have encouraged you to do.
Did anybody notice any issues with grammar? Did everybody read out loud? How did it go?
Visual: Slide changes to "Writing Process in Practice" and includes prompts for reflection.
Audio: Joe: A couple of folks mentioned PERRLA in the chat box. PERRLA is fine but bear in mind you'll still need to know the rules because you'll need to be able to check PERRLA to make sure that it is formatted your citations and references properly. The big down side from an editor perspective when you use PERRLA the reference list is more difficult to manage. When you might receive course paper reviews from instructors or chapter reviews during the capstone process, so as within software, use it but use it with caution and don't let it be the final arbiter of editing decisions you make. Still work on developing your editorial apparatus by embracing your instructor feedback, by using Grammarly and by learning along the way and getting better with each paper that you write.
Okay. We have about ten minutes left so we can move on to Dr. Marshall I believe to wrap things up.
Visual: Slide changes to "Additional Resources" and includes links to different resources including the Academic Skills Center, the Writing Center, and the Walden Library.
Audio: Heidi: Great. Thank you. Joe, before you go we had a couple of students asking for clarification on what PERRLA is and you had mentioned you have some -- your feelings about that so I might let you address that question.
Audio: PERRLA is software used to help students format in-text citations and references. It's something that can be downloaded. I'm pretty sure there's a fee associated with it. I've never used it myself but essentially it's citation and reference formatting software. You plug in the items that are required and then PERRLA does the formatting for you.
The problem is I often see issues with improperly formatted citations and references when students are using PERRLA. For example they forget the comma between the author's surname and the publication year in an in-text parenthetical citation and the references can be a little bit scattered. It's a helpful tool but it's not something that I think you should ultimately rely on but that's my personal feeling about it. I struggle as an editor when citations and references have been formed using that because I can't insert comments to help folks understand specific issues because the entire reference list gets highlighted when I insert comments, for example. But check it out. You can Google PERRLA and give it a try if you want to, but I as a general rule I encourage everybody to learn how to format your citations and references manually by checking the APA manual. The old school way I think is still best.
Audio: Heidi: Great, yeah, I agree. I have not had as an instructor and an editor at Walden I've not always been that impressed with that -- any APA software whether it's PERRLA or another so I want to make sure that the students know that if you are using a program like that it can be a little bit of a time saver but you still need to proofread every reference citation and citation to make sure it's correct because it's not guaranteed that it will be if you're using the software. So point that out.
On this slide you'll see some links to helpful resources and I think we have linked to several of these or pages within these website in our chat box as questions have come up, the Academic Skills Center which is where our writing courses are housed. The Writing Center we've discussed several times and of course the library. I don't think we've talked much about the library but in that prewriting process particularly if you're having difficulty finding sources, gathering enough evidence and literature to put together your assignment at the beginning, you would want to reach out to the library. The librarians are wizards at helping students find appropriate resources for their assignments. So want to make sure we mention that as well.
Visual: Slide changes to "Q&A Section"
Audio: Heidi: And that's really all the content we have for you today but we wanted to make sure we left plenty of time for questions and I see there are still some comments and questions coming into the chat box so if you have a question and you haven't asked it yet now would be the time to do that. If you haven't been into that chat box area to read through the discussion that's been happening I recommend you take a couple of meant now to do that before or presentation ends.
And I'm just going through the chat to see if there are any questions there that have not yet been answered.
Okay. So I see Denise is asking about track changes and inserted comments in a Microsoft Word document so when you submit a paper to an instructor or to the Writing Center the way we give feedback often is to use a Microsoft Office the Word track changes feature and insert comments comments feature. That allows us to demonstrate edits within the paper and make comments about what we corrected and how and why you can correct it moving forward so what you end up with is a paper that has that direct edits in it as well as comments and as Denise mentioned you want to revise within the same document but obviously you don't want to submit it with all the comments and track changes in there. So what you want to do is in the review menu in Microsoft Word if you click on the review menu you're going to want to turn off track changes and then you'll see the word accept and you can accept or reflect each individual edit based on how you're revising so you can go through individually and accept or reject those and you can delete comments. You can right click on the comments and delete it or you'll see in Microsoft Word there's an option to delete comments as you come across them. So it is a little bit of a manual process there so you're going through each comment and revision one at a time and you as the ultimate author of that paper are making the decision about whether or not you want to accept or reject those edits and comments. I would not recommend copying and pasting into a new document because often you will lose some of the crucial editing or feedback that you received. For example when I'm looking at a student paper I will often make an edit on a student's behalf to correct an error simply to demonstrate it so if you copy and paste into a new document you might lose some of the that work that an editor or instructor has done on your behalf so I recommend working right within that same document.
We have a few minutes left if you have any final questions. I know my colleagues are doing a great job responding in the chat box. And Dr. Gredler, Dr. Hudson, any additional comments that you want to make?
Audio: Brenda: I would just encourage all of our scholars here to really try doing more prewriting and unrestricted first drafts and then giving themselves time to do multiple revisions, and I know it seems like it's a lot of extra work or the instinct is to get it right the first time but in the long run I think if you really embrace the write process which involves, you know, prewriting work and messy first drafts and multiple revisions, in the long run you actually save yourself time and headache.
Audio: Joe: I would certainly echo those sentiments. Writing is rewriting. If you can embrace the process you'll do a much better job with the product of the try to get drafts done earlier in the week so you have time to get your rest, bring fresh eyes that you can bring to the table as a reviser and editor and do the write in stages. As Dr. Hudson mentioned, you'll probably end up with a better product, you'll likely end up with a better product and you'll probably spend less time overall than scrambling at the last minute which typically results in all sorts of issues and embarrassments which can be avoided.
Visual: Slide changes to “Closing slide” and includes information about the Academic Skills Center, including email, and monthly updates with the Savvy Student Newsletter.
Audio: Shawna: Thank you all for attending this presentation, and I will end the presentation now.