Unit 6: Polishing Your Research Paper
Now that you have completed the draft of your research paper, you will revise and polish it. Remember that writing is a process from the pre-writing phase to drafting to revising your essay. This unit will review techniques for revising and improving your writing in this unit. In revising your paper, you will consider the use of diction, sentence-level issues (like transitional phrases, grammar, tone, and so on), paragraph-level problems (like cohesion or relating the paragraph to your thesis), and incorporating proper format for MLA style.
Completing this unit should take you approximately 13 hours.
Upon successful completion of this unit, the student will be able to:
- revise language and diction in a research paper;
- revise sentence-level problems in a research paper;
- revise paragraph-level problems in a research paper; and
- develop a polished final draft of an academic research paper that incorporates MLA-style citations and bibliographic information.
6.1: Review, Revise, and Finalize Your Research Paper
Read this section and complete the exercises, which will help you to identify areas of weakness in your paper that need revision and what steps need to be taken to improve your writing.
6.2: Completing Your Research Paper
Read this section and complete the exercises, which will help you take steps to revise your paper. Throughout these exercises, you will have the opportunity to edit your paper several times and correct the most common problems in research writing.
Prepare a polished, publishable version that meets all MLA formatting and style requirements. Be sure that your paper meets all requirements for page layout and formatting and that all of your citations are properly formatted. As a final step, proofread and spell-check your entire paper, including the abstract and bibliography.
If you would like to share you work with other students, you may post your paper to our discussion forums.
Unit 6 Assessment
- Receive a grade
Take this assessment to see how well you understood this unit.
- This assessment does not count towards your grade. It is just for practice!
- You will see the correct answers when you submit your answers. Use this to help you study for the final exam!
- You can take this assessment as many times as you want, whenever you want.