Assignment 1 instructions

The brief • Your task is to edit the accompanying text, based on copyediting that we studied in Weeks 3 and 4, and on stylistic editing that we studied in Weeks 5 and 6.

• Use your class notes and the model answers posted on Cecil to help you and guide you with your work.

• There are two parts to making stylistic changes in this assignment. Firstly, for each problem that you’ve identified, insert a brief comment explaining what it is, based clearly on the guidelines in the class notes. For example: “main verb too far from beginning of sentence”, or “nominalisation”, or “passive sentence”, or “missing comma”, or “weak beginning”. Secondly, for each problem that you’ve identified, either make a suitable change to fix the problem, or insert a comment explaining and justifying why no editing might needed in that particular instance.

• Please use Track Changes. Please also use the Comments feature to insert comments, indicating clearly to which particular words or phrases these comments apply. Do this by selecting the word or phrase and then clicking ‘insert comment’.

• Keep three important things in mind during your editing:

1) Make sure that you read carefully and understand the meaning before editing.

2) Try to make the minimum of changes that you need to make to achieve a good result (i.e. be careful not to over-edit).

3) Check that in correcting one problem you don’t introduce another (e.g. in correcting a nominalisation, you create a lack of parallel structure).

• Remember that you don’t have to do any content editing or structural editing—these aren’t assessed in this assignment. Remember also not to edit any quotations in the text, because these are someone else’s words.

Handing in
Please send the assignment by 12 noon on Friday. Kindly let me know before the due date if you need an extension.