Page 6 Publishing Your Report

1. Focus on the three elements of good writing:  coherence, unity, and emphasis.  (review this lesson if needed)

Always review your work to ensure the topic has been covered thoroughly. Ask yourself, “What did I miss?” or “What can I add?” Think carefully about whether you have achieved your purpose clearly with the topic.

2. How ideas are presented can be as significant as the ideas themselves. Diction or word choice should always be appropriate to the topic, purpose, and audience. A report is a formal piece of writing that never uses slang, contractions, or colloquialisms.

3. Proofread your work carefully for spelling and grammatical errors. Taking a break between revising and proofreading is always advisable so that your brain does not supply missing or repeated words.

• Peer Editing:  Have a student or peer provide feedback about how you can improve your work. Offer to be a peer editor for someone else in the future.
  
  
• Reading from the Bottom Up:  Sometimes your brain becomes so familiar with what you wrote that it develops “blind spots” in which you miss errors that are obvious to others. A great way to catch mistakes is to start reading from the last sentence to the first. Focus on one sentence at a time and finding errors or typos is easier.

• Consulting a Writer’s Handbook or a Dictionary: Handbooks help you with your writing. They can help you restructure sentences or revise your choices of words. Use a thesaurus for alternate words with similar meanings to pursue your main topic. This enables you to maintain your focus with various words rather than repetition of one key word. This variety helps to make your writing interesting to the reader.