Editing the final draft

Editing for technical aspects

By this stage your assignment should be well structured, and have few grammatical errors. What about technical aspects which will affect the overall appearance of your work? Spelling errors can be quite easily avoided by running the spell check program on your computer. However, if you aren't a very good speller, don't just rely on the spell checker, but consult your dictionary. This can help you avoid embarrassing errors like this one:

Urine Bronfenbrenner's ecological system theory... (Uri Bronfenbrenner! This is the problem with spell checkers!)

Spell checkers are also notoriously bad at checking the technical and specialist language of disciplines so make sure you hand check the spelling of these types of words.

Other things to look out for are the inclusion of a cover sheet with your name, course, marker's name, and the assignment title, particularly if you have had to develop your own assignment topic. Markers like assignments to be double spaced, and with a substantial margin so that there is plenty of room for comments. You also need to keep within the assignment word limit. Finally, a reference list (or bibliography) with details of references in alphabetical order by author is an essential feature of most assignments. It should look something like this one:

References
Berkenkotter, C. & Huckin, T. (1995). Genre knowledge in disciplinary communication. Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Bizzell, P. (1982). Cognition, convention and certainty: What we need to know about writing. Pre/text, 3 (3), 213-243.
Candlin, C. (1998). Researching writing in the academy: Participants, texts, processes and practices. In C. Candlin & G. Plum (Eds.), Researching academic literacies (pp. 1-30). Macquarie University, Sydney: The National Centre for English Language Teaching and Research (NCELTR).

For more information on how to set out your references and compiling a reference list, click here