"Close Reading a Text and Avoiding Pitfalls" by Purdue Owl focuses on techniques for capturing all the themes and meanings of your paper or essay summaries. This can help you organize your writing so there is less time wasted backtracking through paragraphs to keep the main points of your work focused and work collectively.
Actively highlighting as well as writing marginal notes can help you when you are searching through your work briefly for a subject. It will also show you how your work flows through paragraphs and chapters.
Keeping a notebook to freewrite helps expand your ideas as well as close loose ends or answer the unanswered questions from your marginal notes. Step back from the paper and see if you can place a thesis statement on it, understanding all the nuances that the author has generated in the essay or novel.
In the "Avoiding Pitfalls" section of this writing we see the consequences of four actions that writers typically come across when focusing too much on just the plot, trying to answer a question that the student thinks the teacher wants answered, assuming that it isn't necessary to focus on the entire picture created by the author but that any piece of the fiction is relevant, and lastly padding your work with extra words to try to meet a word requirement for the assignment. These four things end up hurting the writer more than helping them.
I need to work on these Ideas more in my writing. I always think I can retain everything I'm reading, but the longer the story the more there is to try and retain. When an author drives us through different scenarios of fiction it is really hard to remember all different things an author is trying to send out. I have done better with using my words sparingly and not "Pad" my work with unnecessary devices.
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