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The fifth chapter of The Curious Researcher focuses on revision. It assumes that you’ve got a working draft of your research essay; if you don’t, then you should use guidance from the last chapter to help you finish off a draft. Remember, it doesn’t have to be perfect. It doesn’t even have to be very good. Chapter 5 is organized around a very simple but important idea: in revision, writers should work from the large to the small, from the global issues like purpose, focus, and point, to the local issues like paragraphs, passages, and sentences. The Fifth Week begins, then, by challenging you to clarify your purpose in the essay. What aspect of your topic concerns you most in the essay? What is the most important thing you want to say about it? Much of The Curious Researcher encourages an open-ended, exploratory approach to your topic, but by now you should be ready to shape and shave. Here you must look critically at your information and make tough decisions about what to include and what not to include, and even what information may still be missing. It’s also crucial that you begin to look more closely at paragraphs, sentences, and words. As you go along, this chapter should help with all of these concerns. Chapter objectives, then, include the following:
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