You've finished your assignment and now it's time to put on the finishing touches on. In this section, you'll find tips for editing your work, using tables and figures, and for including appendices in your assignments. You'll also learn about another important consideration: accessibility.
Revising your work
After you finish writing your assignment, it's time to submit, right? Wrong! Here are some steps you can follow to make sure you submit quality work.
When you are working on an assignment for a long time, it can be difficult to see the problems or errors that it may contain. By waiting a day or two before you review your work, you will be able to look at it with fresh eyes. This often leads to catching more mistakes.
Have you met your objectives?
It's important to check that what you have written or produced is relevant to your assignment topic. An effective way to do this is to:
Revisit the assignment prompt to ensure your content addresses all the required topics.
Verify that the points you outlined in your introduction are thoroughly covered in your body paragraphs and align with the prompt.
Have met assignment criteria?
To check this, it can be useful to turn the assignment's instructions and rubric into a checklist. This can be done by summarising the main themes from the assignment instructions and rubric into brief bullet points.
For example: (give example assignment instructions and how they can be put into a checklist)
Check the flow
To ensure your assignment flows well:
Reread your introduction and list the points you said would be to covered in your assignment. Then, check the first sentence of each body paragraph to ensure these topics have been addressed.
Examine your body paragraphs to ensure they are logically grouped by theme. Avoid jumping back and forth between topics.
Confirm that each paragraph focuses on a single theme.
Are your ideas expressed clearly?
Have you avoided using long, overly complicated sentences? Have you avoided jargon? Have you provided necessary explanation?
Proofread
When you proofread, you check your writing for mistakes such as grammatical, punctuation, and spelling errors. If your writing contains too many of these errors, it could make your writing difficult to understand and appear less professional. Proofreading, by RMIT, licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0
Some effective techniques for proofreading are:
Read your work aloud. This can help identify places where your writing does not flow well.
Understand the errors that you often make. For example, are there any words that you frequently misspell? Are there any grammatical errors you commonly make?
Read slowly and carefully.
Take breaks to ensure your concentration is sharp.
Some people like to read their work backwards. This helps them focus on spelling errors, as they only concentrate on spelling rather than the meaning of the text.
Read this paragraph and see how many grammatical and spelling mistakes you can find. Use some of the techniques you have just learnt.
...singificant environmental implications: Incorrect spelling. It should be significant.
The environmental impact of rocket launches are considerable: The subject of the sent is singular, so the verb should be is, not are.
The chemicals released during launches can to damage...: to should not come after can. Delete to.
...the ozone laer: Incorrect spelling. It should be layer.
...the sustainability of frequent lunches: Incorrect spelling. It should be launches.
This debris, which including defunct satellites...: Change including to include.
...a effect known as the Kessler Syndrome: Change a to an.
...teh need for better stewardship: Incorrect spelling. It should be the.
...envirometal challenges: Incorrect spelling. It should be environmental.
Check referencing and citation
Referencing and citation are often included in the marking criteria for assignments. That's why it is important to make sure that you have included both a citation and a reference for all ideas, theories, studies, computer code, information and images that have come from other sources.
Ensure you use the referencing style specified in your assignment instructions and that citations and references are correctly formatted. This includes using the correct order of information and proper punctuation.
Still not sure if you're on the right track?
If you still have any doubts about your assignment, contact RMIT's Study Support. This team has members who specialise in academic writing, maths, science, referencing and finding reliable sources of information.
