Week 14 — Edit Every Sentence Boundary — Traditional alternative (no AI)

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

Assignment 13 of the term — proofread a draft paragraph one error type at a time, diagnose and repair every sentence-boundary error with the clause test and the five valid fixes, correct agreement, pronoun, apostrophe, and comma errors, test a chatbot's grammar changes, and explain one rule to someone outside the course.

This week you learned to proofread with three moves, to find the clauses in any sentence, to name the fragment, the comma splice, and the fused sentence, to repair them with the five valid fixes, and to correct agreement, pronoun reference, apostrophes, and commas. In Week 1 you placed proofreading as the last pass inside editing; this week that pass becomes a set of skills you can run on purpose. 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

This week you edit for the errors that cost a reader's trust. Your material is an illustrative student draft arguing that a community library should stay open later on weeknights, written for this course and attributed to no one. Here is one of its body paragraphs, one word group per line. Each line is punctuated as a sentence; not every line is one.

1. "The library closes at six on weeknights, most working adults cannot get there in time."
2. "Because the bus from the industrial park arrives at six fifteen."
3. "A survey of patrons show that evening hours are the most requested change."
4. "The branch could stay open until nine its budget already covers two evening staff."
5. "When the director met with the board chair, she presented the request."
6. "Longer hours would serve the people who need the library most, and the cost is small."
7. "The librarys reading room has the only public computers in the neighborhood."
8. "After the reading room closes students lose their only quiet place to study."

Part A — the boundary pass. Run the clause test on every line: count its independent clauses and look at what joins them. Then work this problem, showing your reasoning:

1. The draft paragraph in Part A has 8 word groups punctuated as sentences, and 3 of them contain a sentence-boundary error. How many of its word groups contain no sentence-boundary error?

Name each line with a sentence-boundary error, say which of the three errors it is, and give its clause count. Then repair each one with a different valid fix, so your three repairs use three of the five. For any repair that adds a word such as "because" or "so", say in one sentence whether the draft gives you enough to claim that relation.

Part B — the other passes, and the machine. Work the second problem:

1. The draft paragraph in Part A holds 7 errors in all, and the boundary pass finds 3 of them. How many errors are left for the agreement, apostrophe, and comma passes?

Find those errors, name each one's type (subject–verb agreement, pronoun reference, apostrophe, or comma), and correct it. Say which line is correct exactly as written, and why the "its" in line 4 needs no apostrophe. Then test two changes a chatbot suggested for this paragraph, described here in words. For each, run the clause test and the meaning check, and say whether you accept or reject it and why:

• for line 1, it returned "The library closes at six, on weeknights, most working adults cannot get there in time."
• for line 6, it returned "Longer hours would serve the people who need the library most and the cost is small."

Explain it to a non-expert

A family member who writes the monthly newsletter for a small business asks why an editing tool keeps flagging sentences like "Orders ship on time, our team packs them by hand." Write a 3–5 sentence message that explains, in everyday words, what a comma splice is and two ways to fix it. Use one repair from your Part A as your example. Name one honest limit — for example, that a long sentence is not automatically wrong, so the tool's flag is a reason to check, not a verdict. Explain any term your family member might not know.

For a different, ungraded example, imagine a neighbor whose yard-sale flyer says "Everything must go, it's priced to sell." Model answer: "When you join two complete thoughts with only a comma, readers stumble, because a comma is a pause, not a stop. Each half of your flyer could stand alone as a sentence. You could end the first thought with a period, or use a semicolon, which tells the reader the two ideas belong together. Not every comma is a problem, though; this one is, because it sits between two full sentences."

Use that pattern for your family member, with your own explanation and your own example.

Audit, revise, and reflect

When your first draft is done, check it against the attached scoring criteria line by line: write the clause count beside every line, label the fix each repair uses, read the paragraph aloud once for each pass, and test every "its" and "it's" by reading it as "it is". Revise at least one repair, correction, or judgment, and show it before and after. Then answer one of these two options in 2–4 sentences; they carry the same weight:

• (a) Which error in this paragraph would you have missed on one quick read, and which proofreading move caught it?
• (b) Which of the chatbot's two changes was more tempting to accept, and what did the clause test or the meaning check show you?

Deliverables

Submit in the assignment entry: the Part A count and how you got it, your diagnoses, and your three repairs; the Part B count and how you got it, your corrections, the line that is correct as written, and your two chatbot judgments; your message to your family member; your before-and-after revision; 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 diagnoses, repairs, corrections, judgments, message, revision, and reflection must be your own words. This version of the assignment asks for no chatbot at any step; the two chatbot changes in Part B are given to you in words to test, and you do not need to open a chatbot to judge them.

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