Week 13 — Quiz (auto-graded) · Revision & Style

Course: English Composition (ENGL 1A) · Silver Oak University (fictional sample) · Prof. Lindgren
Objective tested: Objective 7 — global revision vs. local editing; concision; sentence variety; emphasis; active vs. passive voice.
Points: 10 (1 each) · Assignment group: Quizzes (10% of grade) · Due: end of Module 13. AI is not permitted on quizzes.

This is the human-readable quiz with its vetted answer key and feedback. The import-ready Classic QTI is in F-quiz-week-13-qti.xml (generated by a validated script — parses with 10 items, every single-answer item exactly one correct). The Canvas placement block is at the bottom of this file. No free-response items — all auto-gradable (MC / multiple-answer / matching / true-false). Every example sentence is the instructor's own illustration, attributed to no one — there are no quotations, sources, or citations to verify.

Blueprint

No trick questions; distractors target the Week 13 misconceptions named in the lecture outline.

Questions, key, and feedback

Q1 (MC). A writer rereads a finished draft, decides the third paragraph belongs first, and rewrites the thesis so the argument is clearer. This change is an example of —
- A. global revision (re-seeing structure, thesis, and argument) ✅
- B. proofreading (catching typos and spelling)
- C. local editing (polishing individual sentences)
- D. citation formatting
Feedback: Global revision re-sees the big stuff — structure, thesis, argument, evidence. Reordering paragraphs and rewriting the thesis is exactly that. Polishing sentences (C) and catching typos (B) are local editing/proofreading, a separate, later pass.

Q2 (MC). Which version is more concise while keeping the same meaning?
- A. "Due to the fact that the meeting was running long, we made the decision to end it at this point in time."
- B. "Because the meeting was running long, we decided to end it now." ✅
- C. "The meeting, which was running long, was a meeting that we decided, at that point, to bring to an end."
- D. "We ended the long meeting, and it should be noted that it had been running long, which is why we ended it."
Feedback: B keeps every bit of the meaning and fires the deadwood: "due to the fact that" → because, "made the decision to" → decided, "at this point in time" → now. A, C, and D all pad the same idea with filler and redundancy. Concision keeps the meaning and cuts the clutter.

Q3 (MC). Which sentence is wordy (padded with deadwood that could be cut without losing meaning)?
- A. "The storm knocked out power for three days."
- B. "It is important to note that the committee, in order to address the issue, made a decision to postpone the vote." ✅
- C. "We revised the introduction and cut two paragraphs."
- D. "Active voice usually names who acted."
Feedback: B is stuffed with filler — "It is important to note that" (cut it), "in order to" (→ to), "made a decision to" (→ decided). Tightened: "To address the issue, the committee postponed the vote." A, C, and D are already concise.

Q4 (Multiple answer — select all that apply). Which of the following phrases contain deadwood — wordiness or redundancy that a careful reviser would cut or shorten?
- A. "at this point in time" (→ "now") ✅
- B. "each and every one" (→ "each" or "every") ✅
- C. "because"
- D. "due to the fact that" (→ "because") ✅
- E. "advance planning" (→ "planning") ✅
Feedback: A, B, D, E are all deadwood — inflated phrases or redundancies that a single word replaces ("now," "each," "because," "planning"). C, "because," is already the tight word; it's the fix, not the problem.

Q5 (Matching). Match each revision move to what it fixes.
| Revision move | What it fixes |
|---|---|
| Cutting "due to the fact that" down to "because" | Wordiness (inflated phrasing) |
| Combining three short, choppy sentences into one | Lack of sentence variety |
| Moving the key idea to the end of the sentence | Weak emphasis (a buried point) |
| Changing "Mistakes were made" to "The team made mistakes" | Accidental passive voice (who acted is hidden) |
Feedback: Each move targets a different style problem: cutting an inflated phrase fixes wordiness; combining choppy sentences fixes sentence variety; end-weight fixes emphasis; naming the doer fixes accidental passive voice. (Note: passive isn't always wrong — but here it hid who acted, so active is stronger.)

Q6 (MC). A paragraph reads: "The lab ran late. The results were unclear. We repeated the test." The sentences are short and choppy. What's the best revision for sentence variety?
- A. Make each sentence even shorter.
- B. Combine some of them to vary the rhythm and show how the ideas relate — e.g., "Because the results were unclear, we repeated the test after the lab ran late." ✅
- C. Delete two of the three sentences.
- D. Leave them exactly as they are; variety doesn't matter.
Feedback: Sentence variety means mixing lengths and showing relationships, not shrinking or deleting content. Combining the choppy sentences (with because, so, when, etc.) reveals that the unclear results are why the test was repeated. A short sentence is fine — a string of identical short ones is what drones.

Q7 (MC). Which sentence is written in the active voice?
- A. "The essay was revised by Jordan over the weekend."
- B. "Jordan revised the essay over the weekend." ✅
- C. "The essay had been revised over the weekend."
- D. "Revisions were made to the essay over the weekend."
Feedback: In active voice the subject does the action — "Jordan revised…" names the doer up front and is shorter and clearer. A, C, and D are passive (a form of to be + past participle); D even hides who acted. (Passive isn't wrong — it's the right choice when the doer is unknown or beside the point — but here, active is stronger.)

Q8 (MC). Readers remember the end of a sentence most (the emphatic position). Which version best emphasizes that the bill passed?
- A. "The bill passed, which was about clean water, after a close vote that few people noticed."
- B. "Although few noticed, the close vote was about clean water — and the bill passed." ✅
- C. "The bill, which passed after a close vote, was about clean water, although few noticed."
- D. "After a close vote that few noticed, the bill, about clean water, passed and then was filed."
Feedback: B puts "the bill passed" at the emphatic end, in the main clause, so the sentence lands on it. In C the key idea is buried mid-sentence; in A and D it's followed by trailing detail that steals the emphasis. To stress an idea, end on it.

Q9 (MC). "Concise writing" is best defined as writing that —
- A. always uses the fewest possible words, no matter what
- B. makes every word earn its place — using the strongest words and cutting the ones doing no work ✅
- C. is always short
- D. avoids long sentences entirely
Feedback: Concision is about strength, not mere shortness. As the lecture (and the Purdue OWL) put it, concise writing doesn't always have the fewest words — it uses the strongest ones and fires the deadwood. Sometimes the clearer version is a hair longer; what matters is that no word is wasted.

Q10 (True / False). "Longer, fancier writing is automatically stronger and more impressive writing."
- True
- False ✅
Feedback: False. Inflated phrasing and big vague words slow a reader down and bury the point; they don't impress. Concision is strength — a reader trusts prose that respects their time. This is the week's core misconception: more words is not the goal; the strongest words are.

Answer key (quick reference)

Quality gate (self-checked): each single-answer item (Q1, Q2, Q3, Q6, Q7, Q8, Q9, and the T/F Q10) has exactly one correct option; the multiple-answer item (Q4) keys A, B, D, E (and requires C left unselected); the matching item (Q5) pairs four revision moves to four distinct fixes one-to-one. No quotations, sources, or citations appear in this quiz — every example sentence is the instructor's own illustration, attributed to no one — so there is nothing to mis-quote or mis-attribute. The grammar/style models are correct: each "wordy/passive/choppy/buried" example genuinely contains the named flaw, and each "concise/active/varied/emphatic" example genuinely fixes it without changing the meaning. No computation in this quiz. No free-response items. Citation-integrity + correct-conventions gate: PASS.

Item-bank entries (for variants + the midterm/final)

All ten items are tagged course=ENGL1A · week=13 · objective=7 · topic=revision-and-style and deposited in Item Bank: Week 13 — Revision & Style. The final (Week 16) and the per-term variant updates draw fresh items from this bank. (Tags: q1 global-vs-local, q2 concision-meaning-kept, q3 identify-wordiness, q4 deadwood-redundancy, q5 move-fixes-match, q6 sentence-variety, q7 active-vs-passive, q8 emphasis-end-weight, q9 concision-defined, q10 longer-not-stronger.)

Canvas placement block

canvas_object   = Quizzes::Quiz
title           = "Week 13 Quiz — Revision & Style"
assignment_group = "Quizzes"
points_possible = 10
grading_type    = points
due_offset_days = 6        # 6 days after module start
published       = true
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ai_permitted    = false    # AI is not permitted on quizzes
provenance      = "~ Prof. Lindgren's edition · Fall 2026 · built with thecoursemaker.com"