Questions to check the essay over

Preparing to Write

1. Have I explored the prewriting questions through brainstorming, freewriting, journal entries, direct questions, or clustering?

2. Do I understand my topic or assignment?

3. Have I narrowed my topic adequately?

4. Do I have a specific audience for my essay? Do I know their likes and dislikes? Their educational level? Their knowledge about the topic?

5. Do I have a clear and precise purpose for my essay?

Writing

1. Can I express my topic as a problem or question?

2. Is my essay a solution or an answer to that problem or question?

Rewriting

Revising the Content

1. Does my essay have a clear, interesting title?

2. Will my statement of purpose (or thesis) be clear to my audience?

3. Will the introduction make my audience want to read the rest of my essay?

4. Do I pursue my topic consistently throughout the essay?

5. Have I included enough details to prove my main points?

6. Does my conclusion sum up my central points?

7. Will I accomplish my purpose with this audience?

Revising the Form

1. Have I organized my ideas as effectively as possible for this audience?

2. Do I use appropriate rhetorical strategies to support my main point?

3. Is my sentence structure varied and interesting?

4. Is my vocabulary appropriate for my topic, my purpose, and my audience?

5. Do I present my essay as effectively as possible, including useful graphic design techniques on the computer, if appropriate?

Editing and Proofreading

1. Have I written complete sentences throughout my essay?

2. Have I used punctuation correctly and effectively (check especially the use of commas, colons, and semicolons)?

3. Have I followed conventional rules for mechanics (capital­ization, underlining or italics, abbreviations, and numbers)?

4. Are all the words in my essay spelled correctly?

So, as you approach the essays in this text, remember that both reading and writing function most efficiently as processes of discovery. Through them, you educate and expand your own mind and the minds of your readers. They can provide a powerful means of discovering new information or clarifying what you already know. Reading and writing lead to understanding. And just as you can discover how to read through writing, so you can become more aware of the details of the writing process through reading.

Lewis thomas (1913)

Lewis Thomas is a physician who is currently president emeritus of the Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and scholar-in-residence at the Cornell University Medical Center in New York City. A graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Medical School, he was formerly head of pathology and dean of the New York University-Bellevue Medical Center and dean of the Yale Medical School. In addition to having written over two hundred scientific papers on virology and immunology, he has authored many popular scientific essays, some of which have been collected in Lives of a Cell (1974), The Medusa and the Snail (1979), Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony (1983), and Etcetera, Etcetera (1990). The memoirs of his distinguished career have been published in The Youngest Science: Notes of a Medicine Watcher (1983). Thomas likes to refer to his essays as “experiments in thought”: “Although I usually think I know what I'm going to be writing about, what I'm going to say, most of the time it doesn't happen that way at all. At some point I get misled down a garden path. I get surprised by an idea that I hadn't anticipated getting, which is a little bit like being in a laboratory”.

The following essay, which originally appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine (January 1976), illustrates the clarity and ease with which Thomas explains complex scientific topics. As you prepare to read this essay, take a few moments to think about the role mistakes play in our lives:

• What are some memorable mistakes you have made in your life?

• Did you learn anything important from any of these errors?

• Do you make more or fewer mistakes than other people you know?

• Do you see any advantages to making mistakes? Any disadvantages?