Prose Revision Review and
Midterm Preview

Announcements

• National Young Feminist Leadership Conference
  03/12, 03/13, & 03/14
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  Must register by 3/09
• Study Abroad Programs on Sustainability
  Austria and Costa Rica
  Deadline 4/25

Presents for You

I'll turn back your Prose Revision Assignment, so we can go over it as a class. Those of you who turned in assignments late, I'll get them to you when I get them to you.

Your Prose Revisions

I've been doing this assignment for a while, and I'm happy to say that these revisions are the BEST I've ever had. However, I still want to impress upon you to approach revision as re-visioning and not simply editing (proofreading).

Let's try to go sentence by sentence on the suburbanization paragraph and ask what is the individual sentences contribute to the entire paragraph. This should help us slow down and really see what's important for revising this paragraph for a reader-oriented perspective.

After the suburbanization paragraph, we'll go sentence by sentence on the Marconi paragraph, which was generally a well-revised paragraph. I don't think we'll get to the housing paragraph because of our midterm preview. Of course, this review of the paragraphs is going to be helpful for Monday's midterm exam.

This may seem painful, but it's really important that we go over these in detail. The skills offered in this lesson are helpful in making you stand out as a good writer. You don't learn this overnight, so you need to practice and keep these in mind when you write and revise.

Jump on over to the Suburbanization prose revision page

Jump on over to the Marconi prose revision page

Jump on over to the Housing paragraph revision page

Midterm Fun

Remember, your midterm is on Monday. If you've read and paid attention in class, it will be easy. If you haven't read, spaced out, IMed, and didn't laugh at my jokes, this might be difficult. Below are some areas the midterm will cover:

• Using verbs for résumé duties

• Revising for passive voice, parallelism, overusing prepositions, and other wordiness

• General guidelines for block and modified block letter formats

• Using jargon, limiting doublespeak, reducing excess verbiage

• Revising to have inclusive language

• Using good instruction language and technique for users

• Understanding the goals of technical communicators and technical communication in general

• Understanding technology from a social perspective

Don't forget to review the Résumé and Cover Letter revision suggestion page.

Journal Entries

Please complete your first three journal entries before the midterm. You may turn them in as hardcopies or put them online (and then e-mail the link to me).

Future Work

Your midterm exam is next class (2/28), so don't party too much this weekend. If you've read and paid attention in class, you'll do just fine.