Grammatically Correct: The writer's essential guide to punctuation ...

GRAMMATICALLY CORRECT
Hearing your own words, as opposed to looking at them, may provide
you with a very different impression of them and expose weaknesses
such as pretentious-sounding terms, wooden dialogue or rambling
sentence structures.
ALWAYS LOOK OVER A PRINTOUT
If you're writing on a word processor (which is becoming the norm
these days), don't do all your revisions online and then print off a
final copy without looking it over. It's hard to explain why, but words
often present themselves differently when viewed on a page rather
than a screen. The effects can range from suddenly noticing a typo
you'd been staring at all along without seeing it, to sensing that your
tone is coming through as too brusque, too hesitant, too formal, too
casual-in sum, you may at this point pick up more clearly on certain
intangible aspects of your writing that can make a critical difference
to its readability or credibility. Just why such nuances should emerge
more clearly on a hard copy is not clear, nor is this effect universal,
but many writers experience it.
FOCUS ON THE WHOLE AS WELL AS THE PARTS
Any time you add or revise an element, reread what surrounds it
to ensure that everything still fits. Often, a change in one place will
necessitate a change in another. Naturally you must focus on each
line as you create it, but as soon as you have the first draft in place,
back up a few lines and read through the earlier text again. You will
frequently find that the latest addition doesn't fit in quite as it
should-perhaps it restates a point already made, or doesn't make
a smooth enough transition from what came before. As you form
each new sentence, keep going back and rereading it from the start
to ensure that all its elements mesh together. As you form each new
paragraph, keep rereading it from its first line to see how its sentences
fit together: Perhaps the topic shifts enough that the paragraph
should be broken up, or perhaps a particular word is repeated too
many times within a short space.
PUT YOUR WORK ASIDE FOR A WHILE
AND THEN COME BACK TO IT
You may feel you have polished your arguments into their final form,
only to find that when you look at them a little later, problems
322