Reviewing Writing

This is some information about what I'm usually looking for when reviewing student academic writing.

Here are the things I’m looking for:

• Section Content (appropriate and complete)
• Evidence (citations used when summarizing, paraphrasing, or quoting)
• APA (spelling, grammar, headings, citation formatting, reference formatting, tables, figures, appendices)
• Logic and Flow (well-formed paragraphs, topic sentences, suitable transitions, logical arrangement, clearly written sentences)

Highlighting:

Track Changes and comments in Word:

• This link explains how to use Track Changes in Word.
• This link explains how to use Comments in Word.

General Suggestions for Improving Writing

• I always recommend the use of Grammarly. Graduate students at the U of U have free access. https://gradschool.utah.edu/resources-hub/grammarly/index.php
• (new in 2023) ChatGPT (https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt/) can also help fix problem sentences and more. Here are some examples of things I've tried.
• (new in December, 2023) Google has released a new model called Gemini. (https://bard.google.com/chat) Similar prompts may work on that platform.
• (new in 2023) APA has come out with guidance on citing ChatGPT https://apastyle.apa.org/blog/how-to-cite-chatgpt
• The Graduate Student Writing Center is a good resource.
• Understand that writing is an iterative process. Be prepared to complete assignments, receive feedback, and incorporate feedback into revisions.
• You may find it helpful to work on writing assignments in steps.
  • (2024 update) I have created a more comprehensive page about the stepwise writing process. Much of the content of this page has been provided there but organized according to specific steps in the writing process. https://github.com/cmcntsh/PoWeRWritingGradStudents
  • Find relevant content.
  • Group content into logical categories according to the needs of your project.
  • Order your content in a logical sequence according to the needs of your project.
  • Write a rough draft narrative.
  • Work on flow and logic.
  • Edit for publication requirements. (length, style, etc.)

Paragraphs

• A lot of final refinement work will consist of evaluating and refining the content and order of your paragraphs.
  • Here are some nice articles on what you should understand about the purpose of paragraphs and how to structure paragraphs.
  • The Ultimate Guide to Paragraphs (Ellis, 2021a)
  • How to Write Strong Paragraphs (Ellis, 2022)
  • On Paragraphs (Purdue Online Writing Lab, 2022a)
  • "You may have learned that every paragraph should begin with a topic sentence and be directly relevant to the section in which it appears. Those are good rules of thumb, but applied too strictly they can make your writing seem stiff. The important thing is to structure and arrange your paragraphs so that they lead your readers through the conversation you are orchestrating. Open each paragraph with a sentence or two that signal its key concepts. Doing that will help readers better understand what follows. If your opening doesn't also state the paragraph's point, then your last sentence should. Never bury the point in the middle." (Booth et al, 2016, p. 195)
  • "There is no minimum or maximum sentence length in APA Style. Overuse of short, simple sentences produces choppy prose, however, and overuse of long, involved sentences results in difficult, sometimes incomprehensible, language. Varied sentence length helps readers maintain interest and comprehension. When involved concepts require long sentences, the components should proceed logically. Avoid including multiple ideas in a single sentence; instead, break the sentence into shorter ones. Direct, declarative sentences with simple, common words are usually best. Similar cautions apply to paragraph length. Single-sentence paragraphs are abrupt and should be used infrequently. Paragraphs that are too long (i.e., longer than one double-spaced manuscript page) risk losing readers' attention. A new paragraph signals a shift to a new idea and provides a pause for readers - a chance to assimilate one step in the conceptual development before beginning another. Look for a logical place (or places) to break up a long paragraph or reorganize the material." (American Psychological Association, 2020, p. 115)
  • One exercise you can use to evaluate the quality of your paragraphs and the sequence of your logic is called Reverse Outlining.
  • Reverse Outlining: An Exercise for Taking Notes and Revising Your Work (Purdue Online Writing Lab, n.d.)
  • Reverse Outlines: A Writer's Technique for Examining Organization (The Writing Center, n.d.)

Sentences

• This work will also consist of evaluating and refining your sentences.
  • How to Write Better Sentences (Ellis, 2021b)
  • How to Write Excellent Sentences: A Guide to Sentences Structure (Streetwriters, 2021)
  • (new in 2023) ChatGPT (https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt/) can also help fix problem sentences.

Stylistic Choices, Reader Interpretation, Nuanced Writing

• I attended a presentation by an emeritus professor of rhetoric named George Gopen in 2023, where I was introduced to the Reader Expectation Approach to writing. The gist of his method is that the writer needs to consider how readers of English prose usually interpret the meaning of sentences and write so readers are more likely to interpret the intended meaning of a work. Dr. Gopen has published a number of works, but I HIGHLY recommend his series of articles on litigation. They're free to access and easy to digest (Available at https://www.georgegopen.com/litigation-articles.html) Most of the articles are 1-2 pages long. He describes how to structure writing to facilitate reader interpretation of the intended meaning. He answers such questions as: When should passive voice be used? When is a sentence too long or too short? How to reinforce key points? And how do you write for clarity and ease of reading? (You may wonder what articles on litigation have to do with scientific or academic writing. The answer is scientific and academic writing is usually about making an argument and supporting it with evidence. If you read the articles, you will see they are very relevant.) I might mention that he has consulted on writing grant proposals that have been awarded hundreds of millions of dollars in research funding.
• I have bolded the articles below that I think are the most useful for getting started.

You can find links to his articles on his website. https://www.georgegopen.com/litigation-articles.html (A couple of his articles didn't have a link, but I was able to find them on Google.) I will group them by main topics here. Items in bold seem more foundational to me. I wouldn't skip over those.

Writing for School vs. Writing for Real (The real reasons we learn to write.)

• #13 Misconceiving the Writing Task: The Tollbooth Syndrome
• #30 Understanding How Our Concept of the Writing Task Got Arrested at the Student Level and What to Do about It

Overview of the Reader Expectation Approach

I recommend starting with the first and last articles in the series.

• #1 A New Approach to Legal Writing
• #42 Ave atque Vale: Retrospective Thoughts as I Lay Down My Pen

Sentence Construction

• #2 The Importance of Stress: Indicating the Most Important Words in a Sentence
• #3 Ensuring Readers Know What Actions Are Happening in Any Sentence
• #4 Whose Story Is This Sentence? Directing Readers’ Perception of Narrative
• #5 Controlling the Reader’s Perception of Your Client’s Story
• #6 Who Done It? Controlling Agency in Legal Writing — Part I
• #7 Who Done It? Controlling Agency in Legal Writing, Part II
• #8 How to Overburden Your Reader: Separate Your Subject from Your Verb
• #9 The Style Proclaims the Lawyer: You Are What You Write
• #10 Why the Passive Voice Should Be Used and Appreciated — Not Avoided
• #11 Controlling Crowded Sentences
• #12 The #2 Problem in Legal Writing: Solved
• #14 Communicating Preference: Fred and His Dog
• #15 Important: Avoid Beginning Sentences with “The Court Held That. . .”
• #16 A Micro-Journey Through a Sentence of Horrors
• #18 The Progress of Thought: To Move Forward, Link Backward

Paragraph Construction

• #19 What’s at Issue? The Construction of the English Paragraph, Part I
• #20 What’s at Issue? The Construction of the English Paragraph, Part II
• #21 Connectivity: The Construction of the English Paragraph, Part III
• #22 The Point of a Paragraph and Where to Find It: The Construction of the English Paragraph, Part IV
• #23 Five Varieties of Point Placement: The Construction of the English Paragraph, Part V
• #24 How Paragraphs Speak to Each Other

Explanations of Punctuation

• #25 A Quiver of Punctuation: How to Handle Two Clauses in One Sentence
• #29 A Once Rogue Punctuation Mark Gains Respectability: What You Can Now Accomplish with an M-Dash

Great Advice for Delivering Presentations

• #41 Killing Me Softly with Your Song: Learning to Know How Your Audience Goes about Understanding You

Avoid Slavish Dedication to Rules

• #17 Irrational Rules: Minuscule Mysteries of Grammar Demystified
• #26 Numbers Do Lie: Why “To Make It Better, Make It Shorter” Is Inadequate Advice

Rhythm of Writing & Analyses of Rhetoric to Illustrate Some Points

These are interesting to read, but are more advanced in application. They may take some time to incorporate into your own writing. (Start with the other material.)

• #27 Bad News
• #31 What Have the Muses Got to Do with Legal Writing?
• #32 What, in Addition to Its Contents, Makes the Gettysburg Address So Memorable
• #33 Mr. Lincoln’s Music: The Tuning of the Final Paragraph of the Second Inaugural Address
• #34 The First Two Paragraphs of Lincoln’s 2nd Inaugural Address
• #35 Mr. Lincoln’s Music: The Thorny and Monumental Third Paragraph of the Second Inaugural Address
• #36 The Power of Balance: Writing Lessons to Be Learned from John F. Kennedy’s Inaugural Address
• #37 Failed Rhetoric: Why No One Can Recall a Single Sentence of Richard Nixon’s Speech Announcing the End of the Viet Nam War
• #38 A Dog in Time: The Extraordinary Success of Richard Nixon’s 1952 “Checkers” Speech
• #39 The Rhetorical Reasons Why Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream speech” Is One of the Greatest 20th Century American Oratorical Gems
• #40 Judicial Musings: How Rhythm Helps Characterize Opinions

Additional Writings by George Gopen

• I liked his articles so much, I purchased one of his books. Expectations: Teaching Writing from the Reader's Perspective by George D. Gopen
  • The book is available on Amazon, but it's pricey.
  • I have summarized some of the main points at https://github.com/cmcntsh/ReaderExpectationApproachWriting
  • In the book he goes into more depth about paragraph structure and purpose, provides a lot more examples, and suggests a process for revising your writing.

Professional Voice

• Tone in Business Writing (Purdue Online Writing Lab, 2022)
• How to Make Writing Sound More Professional (Grammarly Business, 2021)

Working with References

• If you are citing more than a handful of sources in your writing, I recommend using a citation manager. If you're a student at the University of Utah, EndNote is available for a reasonable cost from the Office of Software Licensing.
• Zotero is available for free. It has some nice integration with web browsers and allows you to share references with groups. https://www.zotero.org/
  • How to use Zotero (A complete beginner's guide) (13 min) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JG7Uq_JFDzE
• If you're citing other sources in your writing, you need to come up with a system to keep track of your notes and material you use from your references. Here is a demonstration of keeping source notes using Miro. https://youtu.be/jnGM-j52Rss
• I recommend purchasing the most current APA manual. As of 2023 that is APA 7 (American Psychological Association, 2020). However, many things can be looked up online on the APA Style Blog https://apastyle.apa.org/
• Searching for Literature https://github.com/cmcntsh/LitSearchAIResources

Evaluating Evidence

• If you need to evaluate the strength of evidence, use a recognized framework.
• The Johns Hopkins model is suitable for evaluating a wide range of evidence (Dang et al., 2021).

Genre resources

• A genre is a set of forms or standards expected by a community (Booth et. al., 2016). The genre we focus on in much of academic writing in nursing is the research report with five sections: Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion, and Conclusion (Booth et. al., 2016).
• Much quality improvement reporting follows an even more specific standard called Revised Standards for Quality Improvement Reporting Excellence or SQUIRE 2.0 guidelines (Ogrinc et. al., 2015). SQUIRE 2.0 follows a slightly shorter version of the five part research report called Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion (IMRAD). http://www.squire-statement.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=Page.ViewPage&PageID=471

Publishing

• Publishing quality improvement https://qsen.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Getting-your-work-published-Demystifying-the-SQUIR.pptx
• Writing publishable work https://nursing.duke.edu/sites/default/files/oermannchristenberyturnerwritingreviewsresqi_ebp.pdf

References

• American Psychological Association. (2020). Publication manual of the American Psychological Association (Seventh ed.). https://doi.org/10.1037/0000165-000
• Booth, W. C., Colomb, G. G., Williams, J. M., Bizup, J., & Fitzgerald, W. T. (2016). The craft of research (Fourth ed.). University of Chicago Press. https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226239873.001.0001
• Dang, D., Dearholt, S. L., Bissett, K., Whalen, M., & Ascenzi, J. (2021). Johns Hopkins evidence-based practice for nurses and healthcare professionals: Model & guidelines (Fourth edition). Sigma Theta Tau International.
• Ellis, M. (2021a). The ultimate guide to paragraphs. Grammarly, Inc. Retrieved November 18 from https://www.grammarly.com/blog/paragraphs/
• Ellis, M. (2021b). How to write better sentences. Grammarly, Inc. Retrieved November 18 from https://www.grammarly.com/blog/sentences/
• Ellis, M. (2022, June 2, 2022). How to write strong paragraphs. Grammarly, Inc. Retrieved November 18 from https://www.grammarly.com/blog/paragraph-structure/
• Gopen, G. D. (2004). Expectations: Teaching writing from a reader’s perspective. Pearson Longman.
• Grammarly Business (2021). How to make writing sound more professional. Retrieved February 7, 2023 from https://www.grammarly.com/business/learn/how-to-make-your-writing-sound-more-professional/
• Lingard, L. (2022). Writing for the reader: Using reader expectation principles to maximize clarity. Perspectives on Medical Education, 11(4), 228–231. https://doi.org/10.1007/S40037-022-00708-W
• Ogrinc, G., Davies, L., Goodman, D., Batalden, P., Davidoff, F., & Stevens, D. (2015). SQUIRE 2.0 (S tandards for QU ality I mprovement R eporting E xcellence): Revised publication guidelines from a detailed consensus process. The Journal of Continuing Education in Nursing, 46(11), 501-507. http://www.squire-statement.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=Page.ViewPage&PageID=471
• Purdue Online Writing Lab. (n.d.). Reverse outlining: An exercise for taking notes and revising your work. Purdue University. Retrieved November 18, 2022 from https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/generalwriting/thewritingprocess/reverseoutlining.html
• Purdue Online Writing Lab. (2022a). On Paragraphs. Purdue University. Retrieved January 25, 2023 from https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/generalwriting/academicwriting/paragraphsandparagraphing/index.html
• Purdue Online Writing Lab. (2022b). Tone in business writing. Retrieved February 7, 2023 from https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/subjectspecificwriting/professionaltechnicalwriting/toneinbusiness_writing.html
• Streetwriters. (2021, March 15, 2021). How to write excellent sentences: A guide to sentences structure. Streetwriters LLC. Retrieved November 18, 2022 from https://blog.streetwriters.co/how-to-write-good-sentences/
• The Writing Center. (n.d.). Reverse outlines: A writer's technique for examing organization. University of Wisconsin - Madison. Retrieved November 18, 2022 from https://writing.wisc.edu/handbook/process/reverseoutlines/