Week 1 · Assignment: Traditional alternative (no AI)

Week 1 — Reading a Writing Situation: One Message, Three Readers — Traditional alternative (no AI)

English Composition Free sample edition

Traditional alternative (no AI), unpublished. In the course this is a separate assignment that ships unpublished beside the adaptive assignment: same objective, no AI. An instructor who prefers it publishes it and unpublishes or deletes the adaptive one, as the note at its top says.

Instructors: publish this instead of the adaptive version if you prefer, and unpublish or delete the adaptive one.

Assignment 1 of the term — read a writing situation with the five questions, sort a draft's changes, and explain the idea to someone who has never taken a writing course.

This week you learned that every piece of writing answers five questions, that the writing process loops, and that revision and editing are different passes. In this assignment you work four short problems on one small set of messages, explain each one, and explain the core idea to someone who has never taken a writing course. This week's lecture tutorial, quiz, discussion, and Writing Studio practise the same ideas from other angles.

The task

This week's shared example is the food-drive message set, an illustrative set of messages written for this course and attributed to no one. A club member signed up to run the sign-up table at the club's food drive, held at a community center, and then was called in for a work shift; another club member who ran the table last year agreed to cover it. Three versions of the news went out: Version A, a text to a friend in the club (27 words); Version B, an email to the club leader (61 words); and Version C, a note to the community center's events committee (74 words). Chapter 1 prints all three in full.

Between its first draft and its final form, Version C went through this change log, listed here in mixed order:

(a) Added a comma after "Because of a work commitment".
(b) Cut a sentence complaining about the work schedule.
(c) Fixed a misspelling of "roster".
(d) Moved the roster request from the first sentence to the end, after the reason.
(e) Combined two short sentences about the table into one.
(f) Added the sentence naming who will take the writer's place.
(g) Rewrote the main point from "I can't do it" to a request to update the posted roster.

The writer's path through the writing process for Version C was: invention, drafting, invention again (to find out who keeps the roster), drafting, revision, editing, reflection.

Work these four problems, and show how you reached each one:

In the food-drive message set, the text to a friend (Version A) has 27 words and the note to the events committee (Version C) has 74 words. How many more words does Version C use than Version A?
The rhetorical triangle has three corners (writer, audience, subject), and two of them, writer and audience, are also among the five questions. How many of the five questions does the triangle leave out?
Sort the seven changes in the committee note's change log into revision and editing. How many of the seven changes are revision changes?
The committee note's path through the writing process records 7 stage visits across the 5 stages. How many of those visits were returns to a stage already visited?

Beside each answer, add one brief explanation:

Problem 1: name two of the five questions (writer, audience, purpose, genre, context) whose answers differ between Version A and Version C, and for each one point to the words in Version C that the difference explains.
Problem 2: read the running draft's Stage 1 topic, "our college's phone policy in lecture classes", through purpose, genre, and context; say why the faculty senate's curriculum committee needs each answer; and name what the draft still lacks.
Problem 3: using one revision change and one editing change from the log, explain the difference between revision (ideas, focus, structure) and editing (sentences and surface), and say why revision comes first.
Problem 4: explain what it means that the writing process is recursive, using the loop back to invention in Version C's path.

Explain it to a non-expert

A friend who has started a new job tells you their emails to their manager keep going unanswered, and asks, "Why does it matter how I word it? The information is the same." Write a 3–5 sentence message that explains the five questions in everyday words, applies at least two of them to your friend's emails, and names one limit, such as that the five questions are a classroom model and real situations can be messier. Explain any course term in everyday words. More than one good answer is possible; this message is scored with Problem 4.

For a different, ungraded example, imagine a younger cousin who asks why a scholarship essay needs a second draft when spell-check found no errors. Model answer: "Spell-check fixes the surface, which is editing, but it can't tell you whether the essay says the right thing to the people choosing who gets the money. Revising means rereading the whole essay as those readers would and asking whether your strongest story comes first. Do that big pass before you polish any sentences, or you may polish a paragraph you end up cutting. There's no single right way to revise, but a reader's eyes catch what spell-check can't."

Use that pattern for your friend, with your own wording and examples.

Show how you got each answer. A reader should be able to check every count and every label in your sort without guessing which changes you counted.

Deliverables

Submit a single analysis containing:

the four answers, each with the counts or the labelled sort shown and the brief explanation the task names for that problem;
your message to the friend, explaining the five questions in everyday words, applying at least two, and naming one limit; and
your sorted change log, with each of the seven changes labelled revision or editing, so your results are checkable.

Keep it to roughly one to two pages. Clear and specific beats long.

Choose how you show it. Present your analysis as written text, or as a recorded audio or video explanation of about three minutes with a transcript, or as a labelled diagram of the five questions and the change log with a short note. Every form is graded by the same scoring criteria. Submit in any accessible file type or as a link; a recorded response may be submitted as audio or video with a transcript, or as text.

How you'll be graded

The full analytic rubric is attached to this assignment in Canvas.

Academic integrity and AI use

This version is designed to be completed without AI: do the counting, the sorting, the explanations, and the writing yourself, without a chatbot or other AI tool. You may use your word processor's word count tool to check the counts. Submitting AI-generated work as your own, or copying another student's work, is an integrity violation under the course policy.

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