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Reading Skills: Reading Your Own Papers

This is an important reading skill that many students ignore. While you are working on a writing assignment, it's very important to read your own paper.

• Your teacher has probably asked you to do some preliminary writing of some kind before you started on the paper—study questions, in-class writing, a homework assignment, a posting to a class forum, or a pre-draft. You probably also have notes from class discussion, and from reading the texts for the assignment. Before you "start" to work on the paper assignment, review all of this material (some teachers call this work "pre-writing"). READ your notes from class and any preliminary writing you have completed.

• Once you have written a draft of your paper, READ your draft before you begin the revision process.

• When your peer-reviewer returns your draft, READ your draft along with the reviewer's comments. Reading the comments without also re-reading the draft through from beginning to end reduces the effectiveness of those comments. Your memory of your paper isn't enough—you won't be able to see how the comments and your paper fit together if you don't read them both.

• When your paper is almost done, read it through from beginning to end to see how the pieces fit together.

• It is often very helpful to read your paper out loud. Sometimes, sentences that seemed to be in the right place, for example, will sound funny to you as you read aloud. This might mean that you'll need to revise that paragraph. It is also useful to read out loud to catch sentence level errors.

• MOST IMPORTANTLY OF ALL, when your paper is completely finished, read it once more to make sure that the pages are in order, that your printer has operated correctly, and that you have finished all the revision and editing you need to do.