Post 6

After critiquing three other literature reviews, including the one in class, I realize the importance of constructing a thesis statement that matches the information in your paper. If the thesis statement does not match the information in the paper or the information in the paper does not match the thesis statement, the paper’s clarity is compromised. In other words, I need to work on making sure both my thesis statement and my information match each other lest my paper be confusing. Another error I saw was including irrelevant information—information that has no purpose in your paper. I also need to make sure that all of my information is both relevant to my topic and has a purpose in my paper. Further, all three papers contained wordy sentences, grammatical errors and undifferentiated sentences—all errors of which I am guilty and errors that take away from a paper’s clarity. I first need to simplify my sentences by either removing unnecessary words, restructuring the sentences to be more concise, or using the active voice where possible. I also need to look for grammatical errors and make sure my sentence structure is varied. Also, in contrast to the papers I critiqued, I used a significantly higher amount of quotations and much less interpretation and paraphrasing. I’m unsure if I need to limit my quotation use or perhaps my larger quotation use was just a reflection of my topic? I do not know, but I do need to look over my paper to see if limiting the amount of quotations would create a better paper.