SELF-EDITING AND PREPARING FOR THE FORM AND STYLE REVIEW
FEBRUARY 26, 2019
>> MODERATOR: Welcome back to session 3 of the 2019 Capstone Writing Clinic. We had an excellent session earlier. Students transferred third coursework to capstone study. And we just talked about how to use the Walden prepublication template. Those are both very important sessions -- you can go back and listen to those recordings, especially with the capstone, it takes a couple of times practicing and going back and forth before you really get the hang of it. But once you do it is pretty easy. You will be amazed.
For those of you just joining us, I am Tobias and I am with Kelly and we are the team of the foreman style editors, unique to Walden University, so every student who is writing a dissertation, doctoral study, any capstone study gets to work one-on-one with a prepublication editor, and our team of editors will revise your manuscript for APA, grammar, word economy, clarity, Walden institutional preferences. And get that last prepublication scrubbing up before you go to ProQuest.
Our next session is about self-editing and preparing for the foreman style review. Your questions will be answered in the Q&A box. Carey has been editor for Waldner about seven or eight years. It has been a lot of years, but just so everyone knows, Carey is an outstanding editor. And when we think of who we want to represent us in terms of teaching other editors and how to have a compassionate but precise voice when working with students, that is really Carey. We appreciate Carey for her position and for her superior communication style.
A couple of housekeeping things. Just so everyone knows about operating in the Connect environment, you can follow along with the slides on your screen, afterwards you can download the files from the presentation in the files pod. Note that we have a lot of links in our web links area next to the slides. Links for the writing community, kits, templates, all kinds of support.
During the session, if you have questions, please type them in to the Q&A pod and one of our facilitating editors will jump in there an answer for you. Note that all sessions are being recorded and transcribed. So both the recordings and transcription will be available in the form and style writing community page. The same place where you registered for this session.
We hope that after the session, you will complete the survey so we know how to improve our services with you. This is the first time we are doing this clinic so we want to figure out how we can improve what we are doing right. And finally, if you experience any technical difficulties during the session, the best thing to do is log out of Connect and log back in. There's plenty of room in the session so you won't get bumped out but log out and come back in, like all technology, turning it off and on does the trick usually.
So now Carey will now present.
>> CAREY: Thank you for spending time with us in the session. I'm going to be talking about the self-editing process for students as it applies throughout the capstone writing process. In breaking that down into concrete tasks and strategies that I hope you'll be able to use to make your editing and revision and proofreading processes effective and relatively painless. And I will also talk about what my group does in the writing center which is the Form and Style review. We will look at how to prepare for that stage and how it fits into the larger capstone writing and review timeline.
Dan and Vania are in the background today answering questions so put your questions in the Q&A box. And Dan and Vania, please jump in if there's any question that needs to be answered. I will try to stop a few times to see if there are issues. But I cannot really see the scrolling text on that side of the screen. So don't worry about interrupting me.
So we have four major outcomes we hope to achieve in the session. . First for going to talk about how to prioritize and we will talk about this in a fairly concrete way. How to prioritize and order specific revision and proofreading tasks when preparing a doctoral capstone. We will talk about effective revision and proofreading practices specifically when working with a longer document, which may be unlike something many students have done before in terms of length and breadth and amount of work, number of revisions and the period of time devoted to it.
And the multiple rounds of feedback from multiple reviewers. So we will talk about some specific things you can do to deal with the aspects of the document to make the most of your revision and proofreading time.
As I said, we will talk about the role of the form and style review and how to prepare for that and then we will end with some links and support resources in these slides that you can use throughout the revision and self-editing experience. And in preparing for the form and style. Down in the files pod you can download the slides, there should be links you can access to look at some resources we will talk about threat the presentation
One thing we often like to break down in the writing center when thinking about self-editing is the distinction between revising and proofreading. This may or may not be familiar to you, I think we tend to think in popular use of the words revising and proofreading meaning the same thing, but it is helpful if we look at that in a way that points out the subtle distinctions between the two because it points to two different tasks in the self-editing process.
It helps to think of revising as addressing the global issues in a draft or big picture concerns. Things like organization, content, ideas, the flow of your discussion of that content, the flow of your argument or explanation. Your focus, the clarity of all that material. Proofreading is more granular and fine tune specific. This has to do with the local or small picture concerns: grammar, punctuation APA, word choice, sentence construction, etc.
Looking at those two things as separate tasks can be useful because I know for one, despite having edited now for almost 20 years, which is horrifying for me to think about, I cannot do both revising and proofreading simultaneously, or if I do, honestly it will not be very effective. I learned that I have to break these down into two separate, at least two, separate passes through a document even when looking at my own work because when your mind is on the big picture discourse level meaning level processing, I think it can be hard to notice the fine proofreading type issues. And vice versa. We usually recommend we approach those larger revision tasks first. When you try to establish your content because you really need to get down the overall structure and content of your work before you go in with a fine tooth comb and look at those finer proofreading issues.
So proofreading tends to be a more secondary step begin this presentation we will go into more detail of what that looks like.
As I said, it is best I think to accept at some point early in the process that in your revision time it is usually not possible to address everything at once. Supportive effective self-editing is thinking about how to prioritize and plan are making changes to your document. I would say the major element is deciding when you dedicate a specific period of time to revising a proofreading, what are you going to focus on in that time? Trying to work from big picture down to the small picture.
And then dividing your draft into pieces and working into short sections instead of slogging through the entire thing especially when dealing with broader or more unwieldy large issues.
Let's look at this in more detail. We will start with looking at revision, which is generally the first stage in the process. You probably heard this advice before. It might sound trite but I think there's a lot to it. To especially when it comes to dissertation, doctoral study writing, there's no point in trying to write a perfect first draft. It's not going to happen. Even if you feel it is perfect you have a number of people giving feedback. I'm sure this is not news to most of you. It will be an iterative, repetitive process. Big picture revision really needs to be the most important stage because that involves establishing your content.
You want to make sure you've given yourself enough time for that process. That also means giving yourself time away from your document so does not making you feel agitated and being overwhelming. And leaving room in your schedule not just for the drafting but for the reworking and thinking about those ideas and revisiting them.
The concerns you look at and revision are, as I said, the global or big picture concerns. They affect the draft as a whole and typically involve abstract conceptual thinking and it involves critical assessment of your own work. And questions you might ask yourself when you're doing that broader revision task is: have you adjust all the requirements in terms of the content and structure of your document? How have you organized it? And is the organization logical, do the ideas flow logically? And in that flow, are the ideas coherent? Are they clear? Do they make sense? Do see patterns of things you want to change?
Some things to think about and approaching these large revision tasks and reading your document as a broader whole, is trying to be aware and key into your strengths and weaknesses as an academic writer. Do you tend, in crafting your arguments and explanations, are you too wordy or are you too terse? Do the paragraphs flow logically from one to the next and have topic sentences? Or are too many ideas captured in the paragraph so there's not a clear ordering of ideas?
One way to help see this is to get outside of your work. That is why we often recommend you find a way to be a peer reviewer for someone else's work. Being an editor myself is made me much more willing to approach revision and see the weaknesses in my own work. And much more prepared to do that. And I feel very humble about that being an ongoing process that continues today.
Part of being a peer reviewer is you approach work as a reader and it helps you approach her own work as a reader, not just the writer who super familiar with the work and becoming probably sick of it but as somebody coming at it from a slightly novel perspective. One way to do that that we often recommend is to find a way to read that document aloud to get the text in a different mode as well as to slow yourself down and see every word on the page. When I am just reading silently, I have a tendency to feel I know what is here and not really attend to each individual word, whereas reading aloud slows me enough to do that.
You see the text and how it looks on the page. With middle-aged eyeballs on YouTube turn the view settings up -- it used to be 150% and now it's 175%. That lets me see all the punctuation, the individual words and not miss things that I need to see while proofreading as well as revising.
The next few slides cover specific revisions or big picture editing strategies you can do, that you might consider in terms of thinking about, what could I devote a specific revision session to? And so there are three strategies we will go through. You can imagine each of these being the focus of a revision period or session for yourself.
One of those focuses might be following the requirements for your degree program in your Document. Step One in Doing That Is Becoming Familiar with the Appropriate Guidebook, Handbook, Checkbook or Rubrics for your degree program. You can look at those documents and have them available for yourself, such as at the quantitative and qualitative checklist for PhD and so forth. To lay out some of the content and structure that needs to be in your dissertation or doctoral structure document.
In the strategy you are looking for your document to make sure you can check all the boxes in the checklist. That you included everything in a given section and/or in the document as a whole.
One thing you might do at a concrete level as you look through the checklists, go through the document and whether you are going through an electronic or physical copy, you might note in the margins with the checklist requires for each section of your document and then find a way of ascertaining that you have actually met all those requirements and included the relevant content. You might do that by highlighting passages, find your own strategy for how you make sure you have met all of those requirements on the checklist. Or rubric or other document.
There is a link here to the academic skills Center's Microsoft Word page, it is very helpful, they have a Word support departments in the academic skills Center and they have tutorials and resources of how to make effective use of track changes in bubble comments for various things in the revision process.
Before I launch further into this, were there any questions or anything I need to repeat?
>> We do not have any questions right now.
>> CAREY: Good, thank you. I'm sorry, I can't see what is going on that site. Thank you very much.
So a second revision strategy has to do with looking critically at your paragraph development and the use of paragraphs in your overall structure. And so, we describe the strategy as summarizing each paragraph and what its function is in that part of the document.
So, as it says here, for some parts of your draft the program requirements are very prescriptive -- that means in your checklist, rubric documents -- for some parts of the drafted might be, depending on your program, it might be very specific instructions on what specifically you need to include in terms of content. But for other parts, specifically the literature review, you are going to determine the appropriate structure for those sections. And the content and natural flow of ideas really needs to dictate what that structure is in terms of your subheadings and headings and what content is included there. By looking at your paragraphs you have written when you go back and self-edit, looking at that in a critical way and identifying the main ideas in each one, you can really help to highlight for yourself the way you have structured the organization of ideas in various parts of your draft. I would say especially the literature review. And then make sure that organization is logical. And you've included the necessary and relevant information and you don't just have anything extra, superfluous or unnecessary. And the ideas follow logically one after the other.
One tool I know we heavily promote in the writing center, and I think it can be a great one for academic writing, especially when talking about literature, something called a MEAL plan. That could be extremely helpful as a revision strategy.
MEAL is an acronym. It is a way of thinking about paragraph organization in academic writing. M stands for the main idea. E is evidence, A, analysis, and L, lead out.
Main idea. Here in this example paragraph is in red, it is what we usually call the topic sentence of the paragraph. It is often most convenient in the beginning of the paragraph but not necessarily. That is going to convey the main idea of that paragraph. I think having a topic sentence in academic paragraphs remains as useful as it does at earlier stages of writing. It is important doctoral work as it is in earlier stages of writing and it does help to make sure you are angry each paragraph in a clear and well-articulated focus.
The other elements that need to be in the paragraph are evidence, which in reporting literature is going to be the statements and findings and statistics and paraphrases from the literature that directly support statement you are making in your main idea sense.
And then, and importantly you have to have analysis. And that is your own independent take and interpretation of the evidence as a relates to your main idea and to your larger study. And then the last element, the lead out, is some element that creates a natural sort of pivot into whatever the
Will be. It does not need to be -- people sometimes think you have to have a statement that says, in my next paragraph... That can often be awkward.
In thinking about the MEAL plan and paragraph organization, you can go in either electronically or hard copy, you can find a flow may not be making sense and it needs to be improved streamlined or worked through a bit. You can note in the margins what the main idea is. Can you isolate the main idea, if not maybe you need to rework the paragraph break and then you can create an outline for yourself based on the outline notes so you can see which ideas following from which other idea. That will allow you to see the broader picture and what needs to be taken out and what needs to be added, what needs to be refined.
The final revision strategy that we talk about in this part of the presentation is dealing with is various rounds of feedback you will be getting from your chair, other faculty, perhaps if you are working with writing professionals, how to incorporate that effectively into your work. I think that can be a frustrating aspect of this process for many because sometimes that feedback is not entirely consistent, and you need -- people of different focuses and interests, but you need to find a way to be responsive to it. And to keep track of the various iterations or rounds of your draft.
So, one approach to doing that, again in concrete terms, is to look over all the comments carefully and try to make a list for yourself, what are the global big picture concerns coming out in those comments? And what do your faculty want you to address in terms of your content? And then you can go through the document and note in the margins every time you see something in your writing that is relevant to those issues or issue that you are looking at specifically in the revision task. And then you can look back over the document and think about how to address those concerns in a concrete plan of action.
Those are some ideas of how to approach revision as a broad task in your work. Let's look into proofreading, which I would see needs to come after you have pretty much established your overall structure and content and you start breaking out that fine tooth comb and looking at the document in detail.
As a reminder on this slide, everybody, even people who are professional writers, have to proofread. Virtually everyone makes mistakes. I've never seen -- and I have seen documents really in quite fantastic shape at the form and style review, I never saw one that did not have feedback, some picky little things such as to get addressed before goes to ProQuest. Everyone has to proofread and everyone makes errors. It is unavoidable. But to the extent which you can present a well-proofread and revise document at the various stages of review, and certainly at the form and style review, it will give you less work to do and make your life easier.
You want to make sure you leave enough time, not only for revision but for proofreading. It inevitably takes time.
Some things we think about during proofreading are those local or small picture concerns. Are your parenthetical citations following APA format, references in the correct format? Do you have correct grammar and sentence structure throughout the document? Is your punctuation correct, according to general rules as well as APA specific rules? Is your wording precise? Are you choosing the most appropriate words? Are they formal and so forth? Are you avoiding things like contractions in your academic writing? If you follow this formatting requirements, those template issues that Joe talked about in the previous session?
That's a lot of things to think about in one pass. So when you deal with your entire dissertation, doctoral study, it will take multiple proofreading passes at multiple stages in the process. You can think about for you, how many things can you reasonably think about it once while you look through your document? And what do you approach each task we maybe you are doing one pass with grammar in mind and you are looking at things at that sentence level. Looking at sentence structure and coherence and clarity. You might do of past running spellcheck and grammar check in Word. That is a helpful tool that can help you spot some of those picky details your eye might mist.
You might search for citations throughout the document. That is something I used to do as a separate pass back when I was freelance private editor doing editing academic work. I would look for the open parentheses throughout the document so I would catch all the parenthetical citation and make sure everything was consistent with APA or whatever style I was applying at the time.
One of the final stages, especially in those final document approval stages, scrolling through and checking the document against the Waldon template to make sure that all the layout aspects are correct, and all of those, that is too much to do it once. That is the main message we want to convey. If you can find a way to break down the tasks into discrete steps, that can be very helpful and more effective and less painful.
>> I had a -- a student asked a question, what are your thoughts about using Grammarly.
>> CAREY: I have mixed feelings because it is software and maybe it is competitiveness as a human editor, but I think it can be useful. I think that it can help to point out broader patterns and make you aware of issues in your writing that you want to look for and think about. I think it can be useful in that sense. I would certainly encourage you to use it if you're interested in using it.
It is limited, because it is software. It is not human evaluation. So it is sometimes way to miss things or generalize things. But it might highlight some writing you might want to devote a pass to. It can be useful. It also has citation checking and originality check tools that are helpful and can give you highlights of specific things if you're trying to make sure your document, for your own purposes, is meeting all academic integrity standards and you cited things appropriately. I think it is useful. Any other questions?
>> Another one has just come in, what about Recite Works, for checking citation. Do you know anything about that?
>> CAREY: I am not familiar with that. I don't know if you happen to be familiar with that one. We don't have a lot of training and background on the specifics there.
>> I was going to add to, I think maybe would this be a good question for the librarian?
>> CAREY: Yes, that is what I was going to say. They are more familiar with that.
>> Carey, I was going to say the same thing. I was going to point them to the librarians as well. I think they might house them, for lack of a better term, and probably be more familiar with Recite Works. then we are as editors.
>> CAREY: You both have the best answer, so thank you. I would check with the librarians. Are there any other questions?
Okay, as always, feel free to break and if there is anything else. But I will continue. Looks like there's a technical issue on this slide. Hopefully if you download the slides you should be able to see the links. What I would say here on this slide is essentially there's, it is useful to use the grammar and spelling tools in Microsoft word, as I discussed. Your APA manual, make sure you are using the sixth edition. APA has a style blog on the APA style website. It is super helpful if you have more unusual, strange detailed questions that are not addressed in the APA manual, that's a specific source that's not captured in the manual, go to the blog, it is searchable and they have a lot of useful information there. I found a lot of answer to things as an editor that I didn't know how to resolve with APA style rules. So that is another resource that can be useful.
That concludes the revision and proofreading part of the presentation. We will talk about a related issue, which is how you can prepare for the form and style review. What that review is at Walden and what the specific concerns are that you will probably have going into the process.
So, if you do not, if you are not familiar with the idea of the form and style review, that is something that occurs in our group, the dissertation editors at the writing center. And it is a required step in the approval process for all doctoral capstones at Walden and the doctoral programs. It happens at the end of the process. Between the URR review and oral conference. we see our role as supportive in that and not really as being some kind of harsh proofreading grammarian gatekeeper to your degree.
I would, I would like to encourage looking at it in that way. And that really is what we try to bring to this process, is a collaborative, supportive effort.
The responsibilities of students and then us as dissertation editors in this process can be broken down as shown on this slide. We expect students to reach the form and style stage having used the appropriate tools and rubrics to make sure they have all the correct content in their document. The content issues or something students will deal with, with their faculty. It is not something we really look at Pickett's over our head and beyond our expertise in the writing center, as writing specialists. Although we will make sure that the broad components are there. So should not come to form and style with your documents incomplete. We assume students have done that with their faculty and faculty have ascertained everything required is there.
We want people to use the template. Because that will make life a whole lot easier for the student, and also for us in the review process. You will have a lot less to do afterward in terms of layout, which can be kind of a pain.
We expect students to know the basics of APA style and documentation and have done a spell and grammar check. Make sure citations and references, citations in the texts and references at the end are consistent with each other. We expect the document has not been plagiarized. And that the student has applied various feedback at the various levels of review leading to that point.
As students fulfill these things, we are definitely there to provide help, answer questions, etc. You can contact us at our email account or at the end or at our office hours. You can come -- it is a brief Q&A, but you can come with questions you have about your document, academic writing, formatting the capstone, etc. And we will do our best to answer that question in real time.
Our responsibilities, as I said, is to help and support students in getting a document that is really ready for publication in the ProQuest database at the end of the process. To do that, we try to provide constructive and positive feedback collegial feedback, to help the writing be concise, and in APA format. We look in a broad and general way for academic integrity issues. Copyright o confidentiality issues and recommend solutions.
We are not methodologists , we are not applying that in our form and style role but we are looking to make sure to make sure the research question is consistently articulated throughout the study, that there's no obvious discrepancies in the way the study is being described that would be a problem in a broader way. And we will make comments about that.
Here are some concrete details about what the form and style review looks like and how much time it takes. On average, one of the editors will spend between 6-10 hours with the work. We take a pretty deep look into the document. We read as much of it as we can and that period of time. Typically, that means we read the first chapter or introductory section, depending on your program. All that introductory material.
And then around 10 pages of the other chapters or sections of the document. And we will make direct edits in there. Typically we will explain what we have done by referring to APA rules that we may apply, we may ask questions if certain things are unclear or point out recurring problems we see.
Then we point out, we model and then point out required changes to follow APA ProQuest or Walden guidelines, we might recommend changes that will improve the document's clarity and writing standards. And we might make other suggestions to improve clarity and readability.
We will use Microsoft Word tools like track changes and bubble comments to make it clear what we have done in the document or what we are recommending. You will get back and edited document with track changes markings and bubble comments with a detailed letter and check this document you can use with your chair to guide the round of revisions new the end of the process following form and style. You can definitely have a lot less to do if you go into the process prepared.
Some common issues we see at this stage are APA style errors and reference and citation format as well as in other aspects of editorial style, like use of numbers, whether presented as digits or words, punctuation, etc.
We see a lot of overall format problems, where the document does not conform to the template in one way or another. Headings might be in the wrong format, table of contents might not be functional, not consistent, that sort of thing. We do not perform a TurnItIn check-- but if there are obvious academic integrity issues like major voice change where it seems like there might be a quotation that putting quotation marks, you may get feedback about that.
We also keep an eye out for copyright or confidentiality issues. Do you have a figure coming from another source, and that source is copyrighted? That is something you need to address before you can publish that, etc. And we will give feedback on those things.
Before I continue, I know there's a lot of detail in this session. Are there any questions?
>> It is Vania again, a question was asked about hiring outside editor, some trying to get that information for the whole group if they did want to hire an outside editor. I don't know if you have thoughts on that. And -- but also that same student then asked if we do editing services for whole chapters. We do not and if you wanted to maybe talk a little bit about that briefly, I guess, that might be good.
>> CAREY: Okay, sure. First of all, I can say that an outside editor can be hopeful especially if you are really getting bogged down at the proof reading level work of your document. Really struggling with APA style, citation style, proper punctuation, grammar, etc. Having somebody, hiring someone to copyedit can be useful. We do not provide that service in the writing center for Documents. . They are back no one you are should be doing any kind of real content development. Or new content writing for you. But if they are going in and simply making grammar, spelling, punctuation, making the comments we would make informed and style for clarity or perhaps revise, that can be helpful.
We do not keep any set of referrals or anything to outside editors because we cannot be responsible for anyone else's paid work. And it gets to be a conflict of interest issue for us as well, given our role in the institution. But it can be a useful thing. I don't know if there were more questions?
Once you're in the proposal stage at Walden, we do not have paper review services anymore so depending where you are in your coursework, you may or may not be eligible through paper review services through the my Walden portal. You can use those up through the perspective and premise type documents prior to proposal but once you write the proposal, you can no longer qualify for those services. We do not have -- as much as we might like to, we do not have a proposal review service per se. If you are experiencing really significant writing issues that are slowing progress, we do have faculty facing programs and you can ask your chair to contact us. We may have programs that can provide assistance in helping you figure out what you need to do to proofread and revise to get over some hurdles in the writing process. But we do not have like a formal paper review style service for the proposal stage.
Does that answer the questions coming up?
>> Yes. You covered everything, Carey, unless Vania has something to add.
>> CAREY: Okay. Can I verify that we are going to 12:30 PM?
>> Yes, yes.
>> CAREY: Thank you. So we have a little more time for Q&A and maybe a break for those attending a bunch of these sessions. And as I said, feel free to interrupt me but I will go on with the last bit of content we have here.
Just a little about the kinds of things we look at and things you may want to consider in preparing your document at the final stages in terms of copyright and IRB confidentiality issues. The IRB approval number is required in your document. That can be in your text where you talk about your IRB process may be in your methodology chapter or in an appendix for you do not need to repeat it, it can be in one place but it does need to be somewhere in the document.
Often people, I was a typically, students promise confidentiality to the people in study site where they conducted research and that introduces a number of concerns we look at the form and style review and making sure confidentiality has been maintained. And that there has not been anything that might inadvertently reveal the study site or individuals involved in a way that could lead a reader know where the study was conducted, if that is not supposed to be revealed.
So that means really looking through your document when you are doing those final checks and revisions in proofreading, to make sure you have not use the name of the study site anywhere, you have not identified individuals on any documents, especially in the acknowledgments and appendices, because googling someone's name along with the kind of institution could identify the study site so you want to make sure you are reacting or eliminating that information.
Another concern having to do with copyright that comes up a lot in the feedback I give it form and style, as people often want to reproduce -- say you used a test instrument that someone else developed, you may have gotten permission to use that test instrument in your research to distribute and administrate administer that instrument but that doesn't mean you have permission to reprint it in your study. And so, that would be a separate permission that you would typically need in writing, if that is copyrighted protected. So we look at that. If you're reprinting a study instrument that someone else developed or a table or figure from another source, if that is presented under copyright he may need to check with the copyright holder to make sure you have permission to reprint that in your study and you want to make sure you are following APA guidelines for presenting full information and acknowledgment about that source.
Sometimes these things are under fair use but you want to do till diligence in making sure you have permission to reproduce or adapt anything not in the public domain. And of course, in presenting tables and figures, you want to make sure they are APA compliant and are legible.
Typically wanted document comes to form and style review, it is returned to the student within 14 days, which is I think the typical turnaround for most stages in the capstone process. Typically, you get back our edited study and a letter and checklist out lighting your next steps with your chair. And you are done with form and style and you are in the final stretch. In rare cases we are unable to complete the form and style review when the document is first set and that delays the process because the document will then need to be resubmitted for form and stop it, we do what we can to avoid this for everyone's sake, but there are certain things that make it impossible for us to review the document. One of those is really significant and again obvious, because we do not perform a standard TurnItIn check, we assume that has been done -- but if there are obvious integrity issues we may stop the review it and say with that we cannot edit the document if it has originality issues. Again, that is an unusual circumstance.
If a document has very significant writing issues that make it difficult to evaluate, that might be something that results in a stopped review. But the most common thing resulting in resubmission to form and style, it's not following the capstone template for the program. It does not mean it parts from it in a trivial way, that means there really is major aspects of the document that are not compliant or major components of the document are missing, the preliminary pages are largely absent. Formatting errors where we cannot just give you, we cannot just do some prefixes and explanations to help you get the document done. This really so much missing that you have to go back and really create the formatting again.
Also have a document really is not in APA style at all, either the citation style or overall heading and layout sell, we might send it back and say that we cannot perform the form and style review yet, it needs to be fixed first and needs to be resubmitted but these are fairly rare circumstances. Typically, we do everything we can to get the review done. But the more you can do going into it to make your document as close to publication ready as possible, the less you will have to do afterward and the closer you will be to finishing and graduating.
For some reason, the links are not showing, my apologies for that. I am not sure -- I know we have some technical issues -- but ideally, on the slides if you download these, you should be able to see the links we have here. It is just editor office hours, which I mentioned, and some resources we have on our website, specifically about self-editing and the form and style review. One resource I would recommend is our form and style checklist, which is the document we send back at the end of the form and style review process along with a letter. That is a long document but it does list almost everything we are going to be looking at in the form and style review so it can be helpful as you are doing those final stages before you submit to us. To see what you may need to address the document, what can you take care of now so you do not need to do later so it is not on the checklist when you get back from us. I don't know if it is possible to put a link -- it is one of the major things on the form and style website. I don't know if it is possible to put a link to it. But the form and style checklist is very helpful. I guess we cannot right now. But on the form and style website, the form and style checklist is foregrounded, it is one of our most important resources.
Two last things and then I will open it for remaining questions. I encourage you to check out the doctoral capstone webinar series in which we have a lot of offerings going into the major components of the doctoral capstone studies. We have sessions on the literature review, the abstract, the methodology chapter, etc. Along with I believe some on self-editing and similar content will be presented today.
The doctoral capstone webinar archive is a great resource and you can watch any of our webinars when it is convenient for Mac. or we do present the capstone webinar series periodically throughout the year if you want to attend one of those life and get the chance to interact with us and ask questions, etc., in real time.
I also wanted to put in a good word for the Office of Academic Support, which is now the group offering doctoral capstone writing workshops. These can be very helpful for people trying to get through the capstone writing process in that it provides structure for the writing process. And a chance to get personal feedback and connect with other Walden students working on the same elements of the overall capstone.
These are noncredit courses, I believe they cost about $195 , so they are at a lower price point then your standard course offerings, and I've heard very good things about these, as a way to get to some of the difficult and time-consuming parts of the writing process and get some good directed feedback in the last six weeks. And if you have questions about that contacted the Office of Academic Support or use the link we have in the slides.
That is the end of the session. If we have any questions, I think we have a couple minutes.
>> you said there's one more question?
>> I was going to reiterate for the group, let Carey we had two students asking when Carey was going over IRB, two students asked do you use the region or state, but we addressed in the Q&A box, which is basically according to the guide book the reader should know the part of the world, the region but naming the city is not required.
>> CAREY: I defer to what you just said [Laughter]. That sounds good.
>> Thank you very much. That was great. Thank you very much. That really brings into place everything we've covered so far this morning, starting with the student perspective, transitioning from coursework to capstone and reader or writer. And using the template. And you really covered all those details about being able to evaluate your own writing, being self-editing and preparing for the form and style review. I think the presentations demonstrate that although the student are at the epicenter of the research and it falls on your shoulders to be the researcher and writer, you do have a massive support network, and its people including the librarians and editors, faculty, to facilitate the whole process and bring the process together for you to have published original research. Big thank you to Carey for presenting and Dan and Vania. For answering questions. We’re going to take about a 30 minute lunch break and come back and myself, Kelly, Dan, and other editors, we're going to have a general open session and talk about things from an editor perspective and answer any of your questions.
Thank you very much. As a reminder, have a look at the web link box, not only for the links to resources, but also to complete the survey for this session, we want to know what we are doing right and what we can improve. We will see everyone back in 30 minutes.
OASIS