Week 13 — Re-See the Draft, Then Cut the Deadwood — Traditional alternative (no AI)

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

Assignment 12 of the term — plan a global revision from a reverse outline, cut deadwood from one paragraph without cutting a claim, recombine its choppy sentences, and explain the two passes to someone outside the course.

This week you learned to revise in two passes — global revision first, local editing second — to use the reverse outline as the fastest global tool, to cut the four kinds of deadwood without cutting a claim, to combine choppy sentences and put the weight at the end, and to choose the active or passive voice on purpose. In Week 4 you learned the reverse outline as a planning check, and in Week 5 you previewed concision as the cure for over-writing. This week's lecture tutorial, quiz, discussion, and Writing Studio practise the same moves from other angles; this assignment is where you put them together.

The task

Your material is an illustrative workplace memo, written for this course and attributed to no one. A staff member at a small design firm is proposing a change to how the firm runs its meetings. The memo's thesis reads: "The firm should end every all-staff meeting with a written list of actions and owners, because decisions now get lost after meetings and the list takes only a few minutes to write."

Part A — plan the global revision. The memo has six paragraphs. Here is its reverse outline, one Does note per paragraph:

1. Introduces the problem and states the thesis.
2. Gives an example of a decision lost after a meeting.
3. Gives a second example of a decision lost after a meeting.
4. Describes the history of the firm's meeting room.
5. Steel-mans the objection that meetings already run long, and rebuts it.
6. Closes the case.

Work this problem, showing your reasoning:

1. The memo has 6 paragraphs. The reverse outline shows 1 pair that should be merged into one paragraph, 1 paragraph to cut, and 1 missing paragraph to add. How many paragraphs will the revised memo have?

Name the pair to merge, the paragraph to cut, and the thesis promise that has no paragraph of its own, and say where the new paragraph belongs. Then explain in 2–3 sentences why none of these problems could be found or fixed by editing sentences.

Part B — cut, combine, and choose the voice. Here is the memo's second paragraph, as drafted:

"At this point in time, decisions that each and every one of us agreed on in a meeting are really easy to lose. On one recent project, the team came to a decision about the client's logo colors. Nobody wrote it down. The old colors were used by two designers. The client was upset."

Work the second problem:

1. The draft paragraph in Part B has 54 words, and its four pieces of deadwood take up 13 of them. If those four pieces shrink to the 3 words that carry their meaning, how many words remain?

The four pieces are "At this point in time," "each and every," "really," and "came to a decision." Name the kind of deadwood each one is (inflated phrase, redundancy, empty intensifier, or buried verb) and write your cut version of the first two sentences. List every claim the paragraph makes and confirm each one survives your cut. Then combine the last three choppy sentences using at least one coordination or subordination, with the commas each needs, and end on the idea you want the reader to remember. Finally, decide whether "The old colors were used by two designers." should stay passive or become active, and give your reason: does this reader need the doer, or is the doer deliberately kept in the background?

Explain it to a non-expert

A new coworker on your team says revising a report means "running spell-check and fixing the commas." Write a 3–5 sentence message that explains, in everyday words, the difference between fixing what a document says and how it is built, and editing its sentences, and why the big pass comes first. Use your Part A plan as your example. Name one honest limit — for example, that a short message may need only the second pass. Explain any term your coworker might not know.

For a different, ungraded example, imagine a friend writing a garage-sale flyer who has spent an hour choosing fonts but listed the wrong street. Model answer: "Before you pick fonts, check that the flyer says the right thing: the address, the hours, and what you are selling. A beautiful flyer with the wrong street sends people to the wrong house. Once the facts are right, then make the words short and easy to read. If the flyer is three lines long, you can do both at once, but on anything longer, fix what it says first."

Use that pattern for your coworker, with your own explanation of your plan.

Reflect on your revision

Before you submit, audit your first draft: check each Does note against the thesis's two promises, read your cut sentences beside the originals and tick off every claim, mark the main clause in each combined sentence, circle every comma and say why it is there, and revise. Then answer one of these two options in 2–4 sentences; they carry the same weight:

• (a) Which cut in your Part B paragraph did you first make too deep, removing a claim instead of deadwood, and how did you notice?
• (b) Which change in your Part A plan most changes what the memo argues, and why could no sentence edit have made that change?

Deliverables

Submit in the assignment entry: the Part A paragraph count and how you got it, your revision plan, and your explanation; the Part B word count and how you got it, your deadwood names, your cut sentences, your claim list, your combined sentences, and your voice decision; your message to your coworker; and your reflection. Each part may be written, or recorded as audio or video with a transcript; 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

The revision plan, the deadwood names, the cut, the combined sentences, the voice decision, the message, and the reflection must be your own words. This version of the assignment asks for no chatbot at any step. Make every cut yourself, and check each one against the original for a lost claim.

Built with The Course Maker · samples.thecoursemaker.com