Writing Exercise Paper Check-Up

I don’t understand this Writing question and need help to study.

It is probably best to do this exercise after you complete the literature review writing discussion for week 9.

Take a look at the following questions and review your paper. Respond to each section. Your responses do not need to be very long, just enough to get a sense of how your draft is looking, what might be missing, and what might need to be added/improved upon in the final draft. This will help you edit the rough draft for the next peer review and the final draft of the paper.

• Introduction
  • Take a look at your introduction
    • How have you established the importance of the broad topic or why the topic/themes are interesting?
    • Have you used statistics or history? Why or why not?
    • How do you let the reader know what to expect in the paper?
    • How do you establish the topic’s relationship to the themes in a thesis?
      • This should be one or two sentences that note the major themes

• Literature Review
  • This is where you establish what previous work has said about your topic/themes
    • What do we know based on previous work? How does the work fit together to give us an understanding
    • Speak to the themes and use sources to back up your point
    • You want to weave the literature together to tell a story
  • Do you have a brief introduction to outline your sections and let the reader know what to expect?
  • Do you have clear transitions between thoughts (e.g., linking one idea, paragraph, or section to the next)?
  • Do you have some kind of conclusion to each theme section to let the reader know what the major takeaways are?
  • Have you focused on tying authors together based on the theme, rather than talking about each article one-by-one?
  • Did you establish your guiding questions toward the beginning of each section to give structure to what you aim to answer?
    

  • Consider:
    • After the exercises we did, do you see any areas where you can improve?
    • What do you think you have done well?
    • Do you feel like you have done a good job putting the research puzzle pieces together to give the reader a sense of what the themes look like overall?

• Conclusion
  • How have you re-established the scope and importance of the topic?
  • Have you reiterated the major talking points highlighted in the paper?
    • Remember, you want to give the reader the major things to walk away knowing
    • If you needed to summarize the whole paper to someone very quickly, what would be the points that stand out?
  • Have you made any recommendations based on the evidence you have shown to the reader? (e.g., policy/legislation, more research to better understand the topic and/or themes, educational changes, cultural changes, etc.)