Drafting, Revising and Proofreading Your Personal Statement 草稿和修改

Drafting and Revising

A draft is a work in progress. A good essay undergoes several revisions--don't assume that your first draft is your best draft! Composing often involves going back and forth among planning the essay, generating ideas, organizing the contents, and editing the results. Drafting allow you to get the most out of these composing stages. 好文章需要多次修改，需要规划框架、组织内容和修改。

Through the brainstorming and gathering information stages, you have generated the raw material to compose effectively. Now you will begin the process of creating your essay.

Your First Draft第一稿

In a first draft, you are attempting to capture your essay's meaning and get it down on paper. In this way, you are attempting to draw out the essay's concept.重点体现文章的主题。

Use your first draft to:

formulate a working introduction 组织思想

organize your ideas

A first draft is often the skeleton of the paper; it contains the overall structure, but may lack a clear theme, vivid language, fully developed paragraphs, and strong transition words and phrases. 第一遍主要是构建文章的骨骼和整个结构，即便是主题不鲜明用语不恰当也没有多大关系

Revising Your Draft修改文章

The key to revising your essay is to determine how it seems not just to you, but to your reader. So--think like an admissions officer! Remember that readers need a sense of your essay's structure and a clear idea of why they should read your essay in the first place. To revise your essay:修改文章的关键是去掉哪些对你和你的读者来说不合适的地方。

Step One: Concentrate on the whole by examining your essay's frame: the introduction, the conclusion, and a sentence in each that states your main theme. Ask the following questions 首先从大的方面进行修改。

Will my reader know where my introduction ends and where the body of my essay begins?

Will my reader know where the body of my essay ends and where my conclusion begins?

Will my reader know which sentence is the main sentence in my introduction, and which is the main sentence in my conclusion?

Step Two: Examine your essay for continuity增强文章的连贯性。

Make sure that your points work together conceptually--that is, that key points are unified by your essay's theme.

One strategy is to OUTLINE your draft. Create an outline of your draft after you've finished writing. Your outline should include:

I. Your theme as it is stated in your introduction第一段指出主题

II. Topic sentence from the first body paragraph主题第一段的第一句

i. example used in first body paragraph that supports the theme

III. Topic sentence from the second body paragraph

i. example used in second body paragraph that supports the theme

and so on.

Examine the outline (which is actually an abbreviated version of your draft): does the organization make sense? Do the topic sentence indicate a conceptual progression of ideas? Does each paragraph's topic sentence FOCUS your theme, and does each example ILLUSTRATE your main idea? 认真思考框架，每个段落是否紧扣主题

Step Three: Revise for focus, clarity and depth. Make sure that the skeleton of your personal statement is fleshed out with sufficient examples, fully developed paragraphs, and meaningful prose.

Style Tips一些技巧

	Examine the personal statement for word accuracy; whenever possible, use a simpler word in place of a longer or more obscure word.
	Make sure that every word you use means what you think it means.
	Be yourself!
	Avoid empty words and phrases like "basically,: "really," "goals and dreams." 避免空洞的词汇。
	Use active verbs whenever possible. Go through your essay and circle every form of "to be" that you find ("is", "are", "were", etc). Substitute more active verbs. For example: Instead of: My love of science was fostered by my second grade teacher Write: My second grade teacher fostered my love of science 尽量用正面的动词，主动语态。
	Avoid predictable (and stereotypical college essay phrases) such as "I learned a lot," "I learned to work with others," "It was a fun and challenging experience" "I learned that everyone is different," etc. 避免用平庸的套话。
	Avoid using clich閟 and proverbs, or other over-used phrases from literary sources. They detract from the freshness of your essay. 避免陈词滥调
	Use a normal, 10-12 point font to type your essay. Don't type in all italics, or in bold, or in an unusual font size. Standard fonts that look nice are Times, Palatino, New York, and Courier. Avoid fancy font types--they are difficult to read. 不要用斜体、黑体，一般是12号字，标准字体是Times, Palatino, New York, and Courier.

Proofreading校对

Leave plenty of time to proofread. If you can, put your essay aside for a few days, and then come back and look at it with fresh eyes.

Some proofreading tips:

Try reading your essay backwards (last sentence first) to catch fragments or other glaring errors.

Have another pair of eyes read it as well to catch errors in spelling and grammar--your eyes, because they are used to the words on the page, can easily miss errors that another reader will easily spot.

Avoid these common errors

Fragments

Run-on sentences (comma splices)

Redundancy ("The reason...is because")冗语

Spelling errors拼写错误

Slang or colloquial language