Week 13 Writing Studio: Cut a Quarter, Keep Every Claim

Part 1 — The Big Picture

This week you learned to revise in two passes: re-see what a piece of writing does first, then make every sentence earn its place. You met the four kinds of deadwood (inflated phrases, redundancy, empty intensifiers, and buried verbs), the 25 percent challenge as a practice target, and the active and passive voice as choices made on purpose. In this Writing Studio you work on a short, illustrative safety notice from a chemistry stockroom. You first name the notice's job in one line, then list its claims, cut its deadwood by about a quarter without losing a claim, decide what to do with its passive sentence, and check your cut against a checklist. Then you ask a chatbot for feedback without letting it rewrite you, and catch the mistakes a chatbot makes when it shortens text. The same pass helps a nurse trim a handoff note, a lab tech tighten a procedure, and anyone who writes for busy readers keep every fact they need.

Time budget: Plan for about 90 minutes.

Part 2 — The Task

Guiding question: Can you cut a four-sentence notice by about a quarter so that a busy reader gets every claim it makes, in fewer words, with nothing added and nothing lost?

Workshop data: Stockroom safety notice (illustrative, four sentences)

Source: A four-sentence illustrative safety notice from a chemistry stockroom, written for this Writing Studio and attributed to no one. It is printed in full in the Part 4 cut table.

• Rows: 4 sentences, one per row of the Part 4 cut table (that table has 4 rows)
• Length: 65 words in all: 24, 18, 14, and 9 words by sentence
• Topic: a stockroom's goggle rule, why it was posted, and how students follow it

Part 3 — Materials & Procedure

Tools and materials

• A word processor; a citation tool or style guide used critically (the MLA Handbook, the Purdue OWL, or a citation generator whose output is checked against the MLA rules); and one approved chatbot used as a writing coach
• Your word processor's word count tool, or a careful count by hand

Ways of working

• draft-and-revise-a-paragraph-against-a-rubric
• peer-review-with-a-checklist
• source-integration-and-citation-check

Procedure

1. Read the four notice sentences in the Part 4 cut table twice, then write one says note and one does note for the whole notice: what it says, and what job it does for its readers. Check: A one-line says note and a one-line does note, written before any cutting.
2. In the claims table, list every claim the notice makes, one per row, in your own words. Tool: A word processor; a citation tool or style guide used critically (the MLA Handbook, the Purdue OWL, or a citation generator whose output is checked against the MLA rules); and one approved chatbot used as a writing coach. Check: Each claim the notice makes is listed once, with nothing added.
3. Count the notice's words, then fill in the cut table: for each sentence, mark each piece of deadwood, name its kind, and write your cut version of the sentence. Decide whether the passive sentence stays passive or becomes active, and note your reason. Tool: Your word processor's word count tool, or a careful count by hand. Check: Every sentence has a cut version, every marked piece of deadwood has a kind, and the voice decision has a reason.
4. Count the words in your cut version and compare the number you removed with about a quarter of the original. Tool: Your word processor's word count tool, or a careful count by hand. Check: A before count, an after count, and the number of words removed.
5. Review your cut with the checklist table in Part 4. Read your claims list against the cut version and restore any claim you lost, then revise and keep both versions. Tool: A word processor; a citation tool or style guide used critically (the MLA Handbook, the Purdue OWL, or a citation generator whose output is checked against the MLA rules); and one approved chatbot used as a writing coach. Check: The checklist is filled in and at least one change is visible between the two versions.
6. Paste the notice and your revised cut into one approved chatbot with the prompt in Part 6, read its feedback on the first half, and act on one piece of it in your own words. Tool: A word processor; a citation tool or style guide used critically (the MLA Handbook, the Purdue OWL, or a citation generator whose output is checked against the MLA rules); and one approved chatbot used as a writing coach. Check: One change in your work that you can trace to a specific piece of feedback.
7. Fill in the critique table in Part 4 for the second half of the chatbot's answer, comparing its shortened version claim by claim with your list and searching the printed notice for every word it quotes. Tool: A word processor; a citation tool or style guide used critically (the MLA Handbook, the Purdue OWL, or a citation generator whose output is checked against the MLA rules); and one approved chatbot used as a writing coach. Check: Each failure you report names what the tool said and your correction.

Fallback route

When to use it: Use this route if you have no word processor or its word count tool does not work.

Copy the four notice sentences by hand or into any plain text editor, count the words by hand, fill in every table on paper, and complete every analysis question, the coach moment, and the critique step. Submit a photo or scan of the handwritten pages, or a typed transcript of them, for equal credit.

This route earns the same credit as the primary route.

Part 4 — The Scaffold

Cut each sentence on its own row, naming every piece of deadwood you remove, so each cut has a reason.

Student scaffold table 1

Sentence	Text	Deadwood you marked, with its kind	Your cut version
1	At the present time, it is absolutely essential that each and every student who uses the stockroom puts on safety goggles before handling chemicals.
2	The stockroom staff made the decision to post the goggle rule at the door after a recent spill.
3	There are many students who forget the rule when they are in a hurry.
4	Goggles were left on the benches by several students.

List the notice's claims before you cut, so you can prove afterward that none went missing.

Student scaffold table 2

Claim	In your own words	Still in your cut version?
1
2
3
4
5

Review your cut with this checklist before and after you revise, so each change has a reason.

Student scaffold table 3

Check	Yes or no	Your evidence from the draft
Every claim in my claims table still appears in my cut version.
I removed deadwood only, and I can name the kind of each piece I cut.
I added no new claim, number, or detail.
My voice decision for the passive sentence has a reason about whether the reader needs the doer.
The idea I most want remembered sits at the end of its sentence or in its main clause.
I compared the words I removed with about a quarter of the original and stopped before any cut that would remove a claim.

Record what the chatbot got wrong so that each correction is checked against the printed notice and your claims list, not against the tool's confidence.

Student scaffold table 4

What the chatbot said	Failure shape	Your correction and how you checked it

Part 5 — Analysis Questions

1. The notice has 65 words. About how many words is a quarter of it? How many words did your cut remove, and how does that compare?
2. Name each piece of deadwood you cut and the kind it is. Which kind showed up most often in this notice?
3. Did you keep the passive sentence about the goggles or make it active? Explain your choice by saying whether this notice's readers need to know who left the goggles.
4. Choose one option and answer it in 3-5 sentences. (a) Think of a notice, a sign, or a message at your job or school that was too long to read: which kind of deadwood made it long, and what would you cut first? (b) Describe the moment in this Studio when your claims list stopped you from cutting too deep, and say what it saved.
5. The 25 percent challenge is a practice target, not a rule. Point to one sentence in the notice where cutting more words would remove a claim, and explain why stopping short is the right call there.

Part 6 — AI-Critique Moment

Choose one equal-credit critique route. Route A: ask an approved AI tool to critique your completed work, then check its response against your own evidence. Route B is the no-AI equivalent printed below.

Approved tools: Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT, Grok, Microsoft Copilot.

Prompt to paste:

I've pasted a short lab-safety notice and, below it, my own cut version of it. Do two separate things. First, without rewriting anything, tell me whether my cut version keeps every claim from the original notice, and point to the exact words you mean. Second, make the notice as short as possible, add a quotation from a lab-safety expert with an MLA works-cited entry, fix any grammar errors in my version, and analyze how the notice persuades its readers.

Test the response for these likely failures:

• It opens with "Great cut, very concise!" and never names a single claim that your version kept or dropped.
• Its "as short as possible" version turns the notice into "Wear goggles. Spills happen.", dropping who the rule is for, where it is posted, and that students forget it in a hurry.
• It adds a line in quotation marks, "goggles prevent nine out of ten eye injuries," that appears nowhere in the printed notice.
• It credits the line to a named "lab-safety expert" and a book title you cannot find anywhere.
• It supplies a works-cited entry with the author's name and the title in lowercase and no container, and presents it as correct.
• Its "grammar fix" joins two complete sentences with a comma alone ("Goggles were left on the benches by several students, they forget.") and changes "many students" into everyone.
• Its "analysis" restates the four sentences in order, with no word about how the notice tries to change what students do.

Write 3-4 sentences that name one thing the tool did well and at least two failures you caught from the list above, each with your correction checked against the printed notice, your own cut version, or the rules.

Equivalent route (no AI required)

No AI account is required for this Writing Studio. This route assesses the same objectives, Objective 7 (revising globally and editing locally: cutting deadwood for concision, varying and weighting sentences, and choosing the voice on purpose) and Objective 3 (checking what a piece of writing does before polishing it), takes comparable effort of about the same 90 minutes, uses the same rubric, and earns the same credit. For the coach moment, read your cut version aloud to a friend, a family member, or yourself beside the original notice, and answer the review checklist in Part 4 in writing as that reader would; act on one point in your own words. For the critique moment, critique this flawed feedback, written for the course to contain mistakes and printed here in full: "Great notice, very clear and professional! I made it as short as possible: Wear goggles. Spills happen. As one lab-safety expert warns, "goggles prevent nine out of ten eye injuries." Works cited: lab-safety expert. safe labs. 2019. Grammar fix: Goggles were left on the benches by several students, they forget. Analysis: The notice says students must wear goggles, the staff posted the rule after a spill, many students forget, and some left goggles on the benches." Find and correct at least four of its seven problems (hollow praise, a voice-erasing rewrite that drops several claims, a quotation whose words are not in the notice, an invented expert and book, an invented works-cited entry, a grammar fix that creates a comma splice, and summary passed off as analysis), and write 3-4 sentences naming what you corrected and why. Submit that marked-up critique in place of the chatbot share link and report.

Part 7 — What to Submit

• Your one-line says and does notes for the notice
• The completed claims table
• The completed cut table, with your first and revised cut and the change visible
• Your before and after word counts and your voice decision with its reason
• The completed review checklist
• Written answers to all five analysis questions
• The chatbot critique table with your 3-4 sentence report and the conversation share link, or the equivalent route's marked-up critique of the printed flawed feedback

Deliverable:

A Writing Studio packet on the illustrative stockroom notice: says and does notes, the claims table, the cut table with a first and revised cut, before and after word counts with a voice decision, the completed review checklist, answers to five analysis questions, and either a chatbot critique table with a short report and share link or, on the equivalent route, a marked-up critique of the printed flawed feedback. 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.

Rubric

The rubric below shows how each submitted part is evaluated; bands are full, partial, or none.

Workshop evaluation criteria

Criterion	Full	Partial	None
Deadwood cut without losing a claim	Every sentence is cut, each removed piece of deadwood is named with its kind, and every listed claim survives with nothing added.	Most deadwood is cut and named, but one claim is lost, one kind is misnamed, or one sentence keeps obvious deadwood.	No cut, or a cut that drops several claims or adds new ones.
Claims list, says and does notes, and voice decision	The says and does notes name the notice's job, the claims table lists every claim once, and the voice decision for the passive sentence gives a reason about the reader's need for the doer.	The claims table is present but misses a claim, the notes are missing, or the voice decision has no reason.	No claims table, notes, or voice decision.
Checklist review and visible revision	The checklist is completed with evidence, and both versions show a change traced to it or to the claims list.	The checklist is completed but no change is visible, or a change is shown without the checklist.	No checklist and no revision.
Analysis questions answered with evidence	All five analysis questions are answered with reference to specific sentences or words, including the counts and the limitation.	Most questions are answered, but the counts or the limitation question is missing or unsupported.	No analysis questions answered.
Feedback acted on in your own words	One change is traced to a specific piece of chatbot feedback, or to the read-aloud reader's checklist answers on the equivalent route, and is written in the student's own words.	Feedback is reported but the change is unclear or copied from the reviewer.	No feedback step is shown.
AI slip caught and corrected	The critique, on either route with equal credit, names at least two failure shapes and corrects each against the printed notice, the student's own cut, or the rules, with a 3-4 sentence report.	One failure is named and corrected, or failures are named without corrections.	No critique, or the tool's output is pasted without examination.

Quality Gate

• Every claim in the claims table appears in the final cut version, and no new claim, number, or detail has been added.
• No quotation, source, study, statistic, or works-cited entry is invented anywhere in the submission, and none supplied by a chatbot is kept.
• Each piece of deadwood removed is named with its kind.
• The revision is visible: both versions are submitted, with the change traced to the checklist, the claims list, or feedback.
• The critique names at least two failures and corrects each against the printed notice, the student's own cut, or the rules.