Chapter 12: What Have I Accomplished? Conclusion and Final Assessment
The Last Edit
Your last revisions have polished your essay and you are nearly ready to submit it. Before you do, however, you must do one last edit for spelling, punctuation, and typographical errors. This level of editing should be the last thing you do. In earlier stages of revision, you are changing content and sentences, adding and deleting content and quotations—it doesn’t make sense to focus on micro-issues like commas and spelling so much of the essay was still in flux. Correcting these types of errors is important not because professors take off of points, but because every time your reader comes across an error, it takes them out of your complex argument and interrupts the logical flow of your argument. In this way, punctuation, grammatical and spelling errors get in the way of understanding your complex argument, and your grade will be affected. This is also a good time to double check whether you’ve correctly spelled all the scholars’ names that you reference and that you have double checked your in-text citations and your Works Cited/References to ensure you have all your sources and that they are cited correctly. Again, while this last edit may seem somewhat cosmetic, it ensures that your reader will have no reason to be distracted from your argument.