Editing has never been my strong point. Now, I do not mean that I've had difficulty making sure my subjects and verbs agree or that I am a repeat comma splice offender. I am certainly not a perfect grammarian, but a couple of read-throughs of an important paper allows me to catch any major errors that might be distracting to the reader of my paper. I find myself having difficulty with editing when I am asked to go back through the ideas that I have already committed to paper and discard those that do not make sense or are not relevant to my argument.
I naturally encountered this problem when drafting my tentative prospectus. When writing each of the four sections we had to submit for peer review, I tried to include as much information as possible. I did this in order to make sure I had any information necessary to my project located in one place (so I would not forget it or lose it amongst the shuffle of the dozens of other articles) and also in hopes that providing more information than necessary would make the ideas behind and goals of the project more understandable to a reader who had not read Salinger since Catcher in the Rye in high school. As I returned to the separate parts of the essay and attempted to re-write them as a whole, I specifically tried to keep from retreading already stated information and attempted to create a prospectus and thesis that, while including pertinent information, did not repeat themselves or inundate reader with extraneous information. I probably was not as successful as I might have hoped at this task, but I hope that it creates a more cohesive picture of what I intend to do than each of the separate parts did.
No comments:
Post a Comment