Practice (page 7 of Unit 8 Lesson 4) - Write your answers to the practice below.
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After she made a number of other revisions, she created a second draft, and read it over again. This time, she edited. Here’s what she looked for:
Are the sentences written in a way that gets my ideas across clearly?
Did I use the best word choice to express my ideas?
Are all the words spelled correctly?
Are there any errors in grammar?
Are there any errors in punctuation or capitalization?
When she did the editing, she found a number of things to change.
In paragraph 1, she used “great” four different times. She replaced it in a couple of places with words like “ideal” or “effective,” which are more specific.
She checked her spelling. She realized she misspelled “experience,” so she fixed that.
She looked at grammar and found this sentence: Children who learn a foreign language can understand another persons perspective, this was found in a study. There were a few problems here. First, the sentence makes it sound like children who don’t learn a foreign language aren’t going to understand another person’s perspective. She wants to say that children who study a language are better at understanding another person’s perspective, so she changed “can understand” to “are better able to understand.” She saw she was missing an apostrophe for “person’s.” It’s a singular noun, so she placed it before the “s”. She also saw it was a run-on sentence. There are two independent clauses, one before the comma and one after. She fixed this by changing the last clause to a phrase, “as one study found.”
Here’s what she ended up with: Children who learn a foreign language are better able to understand another person’s perspective, as one study found.
It was important that she looked at her paper with an editor’s eye as she found a number of changes to make!
Spelling Correctly Portfolio
One of the most important editing steps is checking your spelling. A misspelled word can confuse your reader and weaken your argument.
Misspellings often occur when you confuse words that look or sound similar. You may have spelled the word correctly, but you used the wrong word for the context. To know which word to use, you should check a dictionary. Knowing the part of speech can help you to know which word to use. A spellchecker usually will not help in this case, because the application does not know which word you meant to use!
Here are some frequently confused words. Study their differences and then memorize them. Doing so will help you to use and spell them correctly as you write.
Here are some other frequently confused words:
it’s, meaning “it is,” and its, meaning “belonging to it”
to, meaning “in the direction of”; too, meaning ”also”; and two, meaning “one more than one”
their, meaning “belonging to them”; there, meaning “in that place”; and they’re, meaning ”they are”
your, meaning "belonging to you"; you're, meaning "you are"
here, meaning "in this place"; hear, meaning "to perceive sound"
where, meaning "in or to what place"; were, meaning "past tense of be"
Study these words and their meanings to avoid confusion and improve your spelling skills. Remember to always proofread your work and use a dictionary when in doubt.