| title | layout | date |
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Revision Guide |
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2019-09-23 |
Our goal for these revisions is to improve the accessibility and clarity of existing essays. I've never tried an assignment quite like this, so please bear with me as we iron out the process. I'm basing this guide on our conversation from Monday, so it hasn't gone through many rounds of revisions and probably is missing some details. Thanks for your patience (and suggestions)!
If you are not clear about how to fix something, or if it should be fixed at all, make in the note in the essay, and we will discuss it in class.
This editing exercise will prove extremely helpful as you are writing your own contributions and help you craft much strong first drafts!
Make sure the essay both very near the beginning and at the end makes it very clear what the reader is to take away as the main points. In other words, the essay needs to very obviously answer the SO WHAT question.
Improving accessibility of these essays for a new college student is our main goal in this round of revisions. Try to revise any sentences that are too long, or too hard to follow. That said, we don't want overly simplistic writing, either. You don't have to write the perfect sentence (although that's always the goal)---just leave it better than you found it. Sometimes stepping back and rewriting a sentence or two and paraphrasing is the fastest way to improve clarity. Don't hesitate to replace prose to communicate more effectively.
Overly general or clever headings usually don't help readers very much.
Informative first sentences that have a clear progression through the essay.
There is nothing intrinsically wrong with long paragraphs, but long paragraphs are quite difficult to read on a screen, and are also rather off-putting to new readers confronted with a wall of text. It is often very easy to make one large paragraph into two or three without any additional editing.
Especially since you'll be paying attention to paragraph lengths, make sure each paragraph has an obvious point. Paragraphs are visual representations of ideas, so each paragraph should have one main idea connected to what comes before and after it. If you find (and you will) a paragraph that makes a number of important points that you think should be separated, do it!
Sometimes there are words that just needs to go away because there is no clear idea behind them or they just don't connect to anything. If you find a phrase or sentence that adds nothing but confusion, delete it. We can always put it back, but probably the essay will simply be better off without it.
People who are not adequately introduced should be either linked to Wikipedia pages (or even better digital sources). Ideally all people and their key work (usually there is just one under discussion) will be linked to more extensive biographies and have a short introductory blurb in the text itself.
Here's an example of expanding an important point that is way too compressed into something longer but much clearer. Obviously you're not going to do this sort of thing for every sentence, but if you can do it for the most important points, future readers will get a lot more out of these guides---and come away with a very different perspective and appreciation of history!
Augustine's City of God made history of human affairs seem less relevant because we are all simply living out God's preordained plan.
St. Augustine (354--430), regarded as one of the most important Church fathers and early Christian theologians, suggested that the history of human affairs was less relevant than Biblical history because humans are simply living out God's preordained plan. This view emerges in part from his classic work City of God, written to show that Christianity was not responsible for the fall of Rome, and which emphasize how we are merely passing through the temporal and corrupt Earthly City on our way (with proper behavior) to the eternal and perfect City of God.
We all agreed that images make the essays WAY more interesting. Let's aim for 4-6 images per essay. If your essay doesn't have any, find some relevant images that you can freely use (from sites like Wikimedia Commons). If your essay has 1 or 2 already, think of some images you can use to supplement what's already there. Feel free to replace images that seem too far afield from the essay's topic.
For all images (new or existing), make sure they have useful captions that explicitly connect the image to historiography. Good captions might be two to three sentences long.
I have not yet figured out the best technical solution to building our glossary and/or tooltip boxes. But for future reference, you should bold any terms that are likely candidates for additional explanation. You don't have to do anything else with them at this point. Sometimes technical terms are useful and/or necessary, but our essays should as free of jargon and unfamiliar terms as possible.
Most of the typography is standardized, but see if your essay has too much bold or italics or anything else that becomes distracting.