Editing Expository Writing:
1. Present Tense? - all liturature should be referred to in the present tense.
2. Do NOT use the First Person - I ME WE MY OUR No "I think" or "I believe."
3. Do NOT use Second Person either - YOU - because this is too informal.
4. If you must use a pronoun, use ONE - "One may think that..."
5. Do not use Questions. Turn them into assertions, statements. These are much stronger.
6. No contractions in formal writing. - don't - DO NOT
7. Punctuation - Are my words punctuated properly?
No Run on Sentences - multiple unrelated thoughts are punctuated as one sentence.
No Comma Splices - Where two thoughts are joined incorrectly by a comma, where there should be a period and new sentence.
No Fragments - Often a subordinate clause not joined properly to the preceding sentence.
Wrong: Terry kicked the cat. When he lost his temper.
Correct: Terry kicked the cat, when he lost his temper.
A fragment can also be a group of words pretending to be a sentence, but doesn't have both a subject and a verb.
8. Spelling - use spell check, and a dictionary
-right click - look up - choose reference book - thesaurus
9. Sentence Variety -
10. Cohesiveness - Is my paragraph all related to my topic sentence? Does my concluding sentence relate to my topic sentence? Are the supporting details and my commentary all about the topic I said I was going to write about?
-Do not use (parentheses).
11. Have I embedded my quotes from the novel correctly?
- quotes can't just hang there by themselves, even if they are complete sentences.
Eg: David "sometimes dream(s) of a city" when he is a little boy, but as he grows older, he no longer dreams.
Eg.: The inspector says gruffly to David's father, "That is my whip," when Joseph is about to torture his son.
12. Word usage - Is there a more economical way of saying this?
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