Revising a Persuasive Paragraph on School Start Times
A seventh-grade student drafts a persuasive paragraph arguing that the local middle school should start at 8:45 a.m. instead of 7:30 a.m. The draft includes these sentences: (1) 'Students who arrive at school before 7:15 often skip breakfast, and they say they feel tired during first period.' (2) 'The school board should consider later start times because they are concerned about student health; many families work early and need childcare.' (3) 'A later start gives students more sleep, it also reduces tardiness.' (4) 'Research on adolescent sleep shows that most teenagers need about nine hours per night, but the average middle schooler in the district reports getting seven.' The assignment requires a formal tone, clear pronoun references, and correct sentence boundaries. The student wants to keep all four ideas but is willing to combine or reword sentences. The teacher has marked sentence 2 as having an unclear pronoun and sentence 3 as a run-on, but the student is unsure how to revise without changing the argument.
1. Which sentence contains an unclear pronoun reference, and how should it be revised? Explain why the revision is clearer.
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Sentence 2 contains the pronoun 'they,' which could refer to 'the school board' or to 'later start times.' The clause says the board should consider later start times; the next clause says many families need childcare. A reader may briefly attach 'they' to 'start times,' producing the nonsensical idea that start times are concerned about health. Revision: 'The school board should consider later start times because board members are concerned about student health; many families work early and need childcare.' Replacing 'they' with 'board members' removes the ambiguity. The semicolon correctly joins two independent clauses and keeps the contrast between the health rationale and the childcare constraint.
2. Revise sentence 3 to correct the run-on. Explain the punctuation choice and whether a different revision would change the tone.
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Sentence 3 is a comma splice: 'A later start gives students more sleep' and 'it also reduces tardiness' are both independent clauses. Replace the comma with a semicolon: 'A later start gives students more sleep; it also reduces tardiness.' A period would also correct the boundary, but the semicolon signals that the two benefits are closely related. A transition such as 'In addition, a later start reduces tardiness' after a period is acceptable and perhaps more formal, but it adds words and slightly changes the rhythm. The student should not use a comma alone, because that would preserve the run-on.
3. The student wants to combine sentences 1 and 4 to strengthen the argument. Write a revision that keeps all the ideas and avoids overstating what the research shows.
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A strong revision is: 'A later start gives students more sleep and reduces tardiness; research shows that most teenagers need about nine hours per night, while the average middle schooler in the district reports getting seven.' This keeps the sleep benefit, the tardiness benefit, the research finding, and the local gap. It replaces the comma splice with a semicolon and uses 'while' to contrast the recommended amount with the reported amount. It avoids saying that a later start will definitely produce nine hours of sleep, which the data do not prove. The revision also keeps the formal tone by using 'research shows' rather than a conversational phrase like 'experts say.'