Revision and Paper Grades

There is a grade for the Rough Draft, a grade for the Revised Draft, and a grade for the Final Draft, but they are all the same document in Google Drive. You are working through a process and showing me your progress at each point along the way.

After your rough draft conference, you will begin revising your paper in preparation for Peer Responses. In order for a paper to count as a "Revised" draft, you must show evidence that you substantially changed and improved the previous draft from top to bottom. Google Drive has a revision history for each document you store in your writing folder, so I will be able to check to see how much time you put into revision and the extent of your changes. Light editing will not count as completion. To achieve a minimum standard of revision, make sure you do the following:

• Add to and delete from every existing paragraph in big, meaningful ways.
• Add entirely new sentences to each paragraph, especially when deleting existing sentences for containing vague language
• Add entirely new paragraphs to your paper, especially when deleting existing paragraphs for being off topic or generalizing
• Proofread for typos and grammar confusion

If you are not sure how much time to put in, I would estimate about an hour of deleting and typing. There is no exact time requirement, but too little time will sometimes lead to too few changes.

Then, after Peer Responses are done, you will revise your paper in these ways again to make it a "Final" draft. I am putting "final" in quotation marks because there really is never a final final draft. You can always make a paper better, just like you can always make your life better. But the same revision standards apply between Peer Responses and the "Final" draft: substantial change and improvement throughout every paragraph, adding new and better ideas, removing stale, general ones. Meeting these revision standards is how you earn full credit on the "Final" draft.

Those of you who are shooting for an "A" in the course will substantially revise your papers because you know that substantial revision is the only way to get the feedback you need from me in order to do a good job on your final revision of Paper 1 and Paper 2. Most of you will likely be happy with the default "B" grade and will, therefore, not need my feedback after your final draft. Still, you need to put a lot of effort into revision because failure to revise your papers fully and substantially (after your Rough Draft conference AND after Peer Responses) could result in "late" work for being incomplete--too many of those marks can lower your course grade from the default "B" grade.

Here's the basic idea: Revise substantially and you will get full credit on your final draft and earn additional feedback from me that you can use on your revision work for an "A" in the course.