Question

what strategies do you use for revising a paper? How do you know when to accept feedback from another source? wHAT MAKES FEEDBACK VALUABLE TO YOU?

Answer 1

Did you notice the word YOU in each of those questions?

Obviously, strangers can't tell how YOU revise a paper.

Answer 2

Here are a couple of sites with excellent suggestions on how to go about revising a paper.

http://www.unc.edu/depts/wcweb/handouts/revision.html

http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/cs6/revise.html

A couple of suggestions I give my students
a) Have someone read it out loud to you.
b) Read it from the end, sentence by sentence, to the beginning. If it doesn't flow logically, then you need to find out what you have left out or not explained sufficiently.

However, IF you wrote a good outline for your essay, and supported each of your points and made sure the topic sentence of each paragraph related to the thesis and that each conclusion of a paragraph both made a discovery and leads to the following sentence, THEN you will probably have a well built essay.

Answer 3

If nobody is available to proofread your work, you can do this yourself. After writing your material, put it aside for a day — at least several hours. (This breaks mental sets you might have that keep you from noticing problems.) Then read it <I>aloud</I> as if you were reading someone else's work. (Reading aloud slows down your reading, so you are less likely to skip over problems.)

If your reading goes smoothly, that is fine. However, wherever you "stumble" in your reading, other persons are likely to have a problem in reading your material. Those "stumbles" indicate areas that need revising.

Once you have made your revisions, repeat the process above. Good papers often require many drafts.

Good feedback does not involve <I>only</I> evaluative terms (e.g., terrific, terrible). It supports the evaluative statement with detailed indications what is good and bad about the paper.

"Your description of ____________ creates a beautiful and happy image in my mind."

"Paragraph three is unclear. What do you mean by _________?"

Accurate feedback can indicate problems within your paper. However, <I>you</I> need to be the judge about how you want to deal with these problems.

I hope this helps a little more. Thanks for asking.