Writing Topic: Rules for Writers Chapter 3

The principal concepts in “The Writing Process” by Diana Hacker are, how to revise an essay to make it appealing to a wide array of readers and how to proofread the essay for sentence structure, wordiness, language rules and punctuation. She pointed out the importance of completing the final draft revisions prior to fixing the sentence structures and grammar. Revisions on the text may cause the writer to remove whole paragraphs or add paragraphs focusing in on newly generated ideas. It is important to make sure the thesis, introduction, main ideas, and supporting evidence are clearly stated. She said the writer needs to know what the main point of the text is and if the reader is able to understand the text.

The writer should print out the text in order to read it aloud or have another person review the essay to provide a different view of the material. If the writer chooses to read the text aloud it will assist in locating the harder to find errors. No one should rely solely on a word processing program to provide accurate spelling and grammar checks to their text. Diana stated a carefully proofread essay creates a positive message to the audience; it shows the audience the writer is conscientious about their writing.

In the essays we recently completed I was told to elaborate more on my ideas. This chapter helped me understand how important it is to the reader that my ideas are more developed and explored. Diana Hacker said, “when you revise sentences, you focus on effectiveness; when you edit, you check for correctness”. (pg 29) When writing my future essays I want to make sure that my text will be useful to the readers and it will cause the audience to ask questions or be interested in learning more about my topic. When I am in the revision process I will always print out my document and read it as the audience would. I am positive I will find misspelled words, wordiness, word ending errors, etc. In the future I will never rely on the spell check program to find all the errors within my essays.