This Revision Strategy Page includes the Revision Strategies I used when I was revising my literature review essay, and my advocacy essay. I also provide some examples from my essay to show the place where I used these revision strategies.
What is literature review?
Three Revision Strategies for Literature Review
1. Introduction & Integration:
Change the introduction to make it more interesting
2. Make citations MLA styles
3. Deleting repetitive or useless sentences
Since HCP is part of Advocacy Project, it is important to change the HCP to fit with the AP Project. Thus, we need to limit the length of the HCP essay into 3 pages. It means that we need to delete some useless part. For the example here, I delete the part where I gave too much details about the three scientific study that I will review. I will introduce the three scientific studies later, so I think I do not need this paragraph here. I deleted the repeating parts from HCP first draft.
I made a lot of revisions on the MLA format of my literature review essay. I know the format of the most of MLA style citations. However, my memory is not very accurate for many times, thus, even though I believe my MLA citations are correct, but I actually made many mistakes. I chose to talk about this strategy because I made several MLA citation mistakes in the HCP draft. I wrote this section to make myself aware the problem of MLA citation so that I will make less mistakes in the future. For the example here, I wrote my name and title of the HCP with the format that Jolly used for her literature review. However, I am wrong that she did not use MLA format. Therefore, I changed it when I revising it.
The first revision strategy I chose is "changing the introduction to make it more interesting". The introduction of my first draft is not very appealing, and it sounds a little bit interrupted. Professor Haas suggested me to add "some comments about bees in general". When I reading my introduction while I was revising it, I think Professor Hays's suggestion was right that my starting sentence is indeed kind of strange. Therefore, I added some interesting facts about bees that people are curious about in the first paragraph of my introduction. I think my paragraph becomes more interesting after the revision.
Literature review is an assignment of my writing 39C class. The full name of this assignment is Historical Conversations Project (HCP) which is basically a review of literature. HCP will be modified to become one part of Advocacy Project. We need to review three scientific research articles for HCP. The three articles we reviewed are about the specific topic of animals science that we chose, for example, my topic is "bees and social behaviors". The purpose of HCP is to provide information of our chosen research topic to our audience. HCP informs our audience with necessary information about our chose animal science topic, thus they will know enough information to understand the later problem-solution parts of Advocacy Project. We prepared for writing HCP for 6 weeks. We did a lot of research about our chosen animal science topic, in order to chose the best research articles for HCP. We also did a lot of assignments, such as annotate Jolly's literature review, to learn how to write a good literature review essay. You can go to my full HCP draft by clicking this link.
Problem-Solution Revision Strategy
Problem and Solution are two sections of my Adovocacy Essay. Problem section mainly raises the problems that bees are facing now. Solution section provides solutions that can solve the bees issues. Below are my revision strategies when I was revisiong Problem and Solution parts of my essay.
1. Tense Trouble
The main point I am revising here is the "tense trouble". Professor Haas wrote that "When explaining what they did in the study, it happened in the past, so use past tense.But when referring to what is said in another text, use 'Literary Present.'"
From Literature Review Universal Comments, I found that I do made some tense mistakes in my essay. For the example above, I correctly used "found" because the researchers did something in the past. However, whatever they found should be in present tense. At my original version, I used the word "showed" which is a past tense, and it is incorrect. For my revision version, I change "showed" to "indicates" because "indicate" is a more academic word than "show". I also change the past tense to the correct present tense. Moreover, I rewrote this sentence to make it more understandable, since my original sentence is kind of confusing.
2. Review of the Literature
At this point, we are writing the Advocacy Project with a focus of addressing the problem that our species are facing, and try to advocate our audience to do something about it. Therefore, the literature review parts are now serving as a place to set up the information base. Thus, instead of just summarizing the conclusion of the study, I rewrote this part to show that this study is trying to show the "complex social behavior" of bees. In this way, the studies can be more effectively connect to the problems I am going to talk about later.
3. Use of Research
There is a requirement in the AP minimum requirement saying that "Every part of the essay is based upon solid research". It means that each paragraph of the AP essay should has some sources. However, when I was revise my essay, I found a paragraph that I forgot to add any sources. Thus, I did research and found sources that can provide my arguments. The example is shown at right. It is really important to have scholarly sources to help prove our arguments.
