Revise Your Work with Professional Editorial Advice from Polish My Paper

Christina Davis, a grad student alum and former instructor from Case Western, has started the website Polish My Paper to provide revision services.  From their website, their instructors are required to have qualifications such as an MA or Ph.D. in English or a related field, teaching experience, or previous work as an editor.  I especially like the approach outlined in their philosophy: they not only provide feedback on a specific paper, but also on how to become a better writer.

Davis's website comes recommended to me by Mary Grimm, one of my former professors at Case Western and the current chair of the English Department there.  In addition to hands-on editing, you can go to their website an take a look at their Free Guide to Common Writing Errors with information on punctuation, sentence structure, writing paragraphs, rhetoric, and citations.

Diagram Your Sentences with About.com

Do you feel confident writing complex sentences?  Or do you fear the run-on sentence?  Does the subject match the verb?  Or has a prepositional phrase somehow usurped the proper placement of adjectives?

One way to double-check a sentence is to do a quick mental diagram. Visit Grace Fleming's "How to Diagram a Sentence" on About.com to see the correct way to break down a sentence.  Besides teaching proper syntax for a full-on diagram, reading the article will make you more aware of how each component of functions within the sentence as a whole.

More on Grammar
 

Write the Reading Experience You've Always Wanted

Everyone, it seems, wants fame.  We want success.  And success, in writing, is measured by readership.  It's measured by exposure to the greater public.  It's measured in the connections we have to other writers and also to our publishers.  Yet the root of these connections is the work itself - the writing.

Writing Your Way to the Long Story

Writing the ten page Whole Story is, in a way, the culmination of the Introduction to Fiction and Poetry course I teach here at Hopkins.  At ten pages, we begin to cross the threshold from college essay into plot development, from simply writing a scene or revealing a character to developing the forward motion of the story.  To read about how you can write a ten page story (or start any longer work of fiction), take a look at my Writing the Whole Story article on the IFP Blog.

1-2-Writing Home - IFP Course Page