Topic 2.3: What Makes a Narrative Presentable?
What Makes a Narrative Presentable?
All writing exercises and essay assignments in this course should be submitted according to the Modern Language Association (MLA) guidelines. The MLA recommends a basic format for academic assignments in the Humanities disciplines, including English.
The assignment format isn't difficult to produce; it requires that you include your name, instructor's name, course name, and date on assignments. Written text should be typed, double spaced and in a standard 12-point font. For a more detailed account of the guidelines as well as a sample essay, visit the Purdue University Online Writing Lab Links to an external site. (OWL).
Writing a polished paper is, in and of itself, a major intellectual challenge and following formatting guidelines in this and other college courses signals to your readers that your paper should be taken seriously as a student's contribution to a particular course or a given academic or professional field. Think of presenting your essay in the correct format like wearing a tailored suit to a job interview. It's just the smart thing to do.
Of course, there's more to making a narrative presentable than its format. The narrative should be presentable in terms of its grammar, mechanics, and style, as well. Prior to submitting your narrative draft, you should take some time to proofread your content.
While there are a number of ways to proofread Links to an external site. written content for errors, it is often useful to review your writing "backward." That is, you read the last sentence of the essay first, then backward, sentence by sentence, until you finish your proofreading with the first sentence. This kind of reading isolates individual sentences from the essay's context, so that you are not reading for meaning within a paragraph but for errors that may appear in individual sentences.
Try it - see how many mistakes you find!
If you would like to get a little practice with sentence-by-sentence proofreading, feel free to try either of the proofreading exercises made available by Pen and Page Links to an external site.:
- Proofreading Exercise 1 Links to an external site.
- Proofreading Exercise 2 Links to an external site.
Assignments
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