Week 13 Discussion — Whose Paragraph Is It Now? — Traditional alternative (no AI)

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

Hook

Anyone with a red pen can make a paragraph shorter in minutes, and an editing tool can do it in seconds. This week you learned to revise in two passes, to cut deadwood without cutting ideas, to vary and weight your sentences, and to choose the active or passive voice on purpose, all on the running draft and the course's concision pair.

Your discussion question — choose Option A or Option B; they carry the same weight and the same rubric, and you say which you picked.

Option A: When an editor or an editing tool tightens a paragraph, at what point does it stop being the writer's own? Use the running draft's revised paragraph and the 14-word version of it in Chapter 13, or a paragraph of your own that someone else edited, and argue where the line falls. Name at least one kind of deadwood that a cut may remove, and say what a cut may never remove.

Option B: Is concision always a service to the reader? Pick a short passage from your major, your job, or a community you belong to (a safety notice, a team update, a recipe, a game recap) and argue whether cutting about a quarter of its words would help or hurt that passage's reader. Say who the reader is and what the cut would cost or gain.

There is no single right answer. Careful editors disagree about how much a writer's phrasing is worth keeping, and a cut that helps one reader can strip out the detail another reader needs. Argue the case you can actually support with a specific passage.

Expectations

Activity format: one initial post followed by two substantive peer replies. Plan on about 45 minutes across the two deadlines; your instructor sets both due dates in Canvas.

Your initial post — by the first due date (early in the module week):

• Say which option you chose.
• Show the passage you are working with, before and after any cut, so a reader knows what you are looking at. Quote a real source only in words you have found in the real text.
• Use at least two of this week's terms (global revision, local editing, concision, deadwood, inflated phrase, redundancy, empty intensifier, buried verb, the 25 percent challenge, voice-erasing over-editing) correctly.
• Take a position on where the line falls and support it with a reason or an example, naming the reader your judgment depends on.
• Length: roughly 150–250 words if written. You may instead record your post as audio or video (about two minutes) and attach a transcript; both forms are scored by the same rubric.

Your replies — by the second due date (the end of the module week):

• Reply substantively to at least two classmates.
• A substantive reply does more than agree: point to a cut in a classmate's passage that removed a claim rather than deadwood, name a reader who would need a detail they cut, or ask which of their changes was global and which was local. "Nice point!" on its own does not count.

What a strong post looks like (illustrative, written for this course):

I chose Option A. I think the line falls at the claim, not the word count. The 14-word version of the running draft's paragraph in Chapter 13 replaces 90 words, but it calls for a ban, and the draft argues for a default with an exception, so it is a different paragraph, not a tighter one. Cutting "very" or "due to the fact that" would be fine, because those are deadwood. Someone could argue that a busy reader prefers the short version. I would answer that the reader gets a shorter paragraph with the wrong claim.

Notice how it states a position, points to specific wording, names a fair counterpoint, and answers it. That is the bar.

Participation rubric

This discussion is worth 10 points. The three criteria below look at your initial post and your peer replies.

Post early if you can — the best threads happen when people have time to reply before the second due date.

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