9.3 Preparing and Polishing the Final Draft
Formal Consistency and Stylistic Polishing
After you have incorporated the feedback you need to and want to incorporate, your paper is ready in substance but not in form.
POLISHING your language and ENSURING CONSISTENCY and COMPLIANCE with all technical and formal requirements regarding cover, table of contents, list of abbreviations, headline format, references, bibliography, etc. will turn your paper from a good paper to an excellent paper and a pleasure to read. It will also greatly enhance your academic results (grade) and your chances to succeed with potential secondary uses (publication, etc.).
The result will be a text that has everything you want to say in an improved version that incorporates advice from others and presents it in the correct format and in the best possible style and language.
Among the best publications on writing style is Strunk & White, The Elements of Style, a slim volume going back to 1919 and currently in its 4th edition.
In their introduction, the authors recommend:
“Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all sentences short or avoid all detail and treat subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.”
I would agree, in particular, with the last part of their statement, namely that every word should be in your paper for a reason, because it contains a message, it advances your argument in a clear, concise and efficient manner. I would add that when there are several words to be chosen from, you should always pick the one that best conveys your message and that a good thesaurus should be on your desk or computer screen while you are polishing your final draft.
The most important tool, besides the advice of your mentors and colleagues, the spell checker on your computer, the thesaurus, and the Elements of Style, will be your own voice. I strongly recommend that you read your sentences aloud, one by one, sometimes several times over. If you struggle or get stuck, a sentence is not ready. If you need a break in the middle of a sentence, consider breaking it in two or adding a comma to assist the reader. If you use different voices (active and passive), different tenses (past and present), different participles or cases, both plural and singular, or anything of that sort, be sure to have a reason for doing so.
Like Strunk & White, I recommend the very deliberate use of paragraphs. Each idea or argument should be treated in a separate paragraph. Depending on the length or complexity of the argument, a paragraph may have between one and many sentences. Unless it is very complex and/or contains specific expressions that need separate referencing, a single footnote at the end, giving credit to whom credit is due for the idea or argument, should be enough. A new point, a counterpoint, a new idea, or a new argument should follow in a new paragraph.
By contrast, many students today use the sentence as the basic unit of composition, placing each sentence in a separate paragraph and a footnote at the end of each sentence. The results are texts that seem chopped up, almost random assemblies of information, and do not carry a persuasive argument. Furthermore, the majority of references end up being “Id” or “Ibid” because the students continue discussing the same point over several sentences. If they would have drawn these sentences into one paragraph, a single reference at the end would have done the job in a much more economical and elegant way.