The 180-Word Editorial That Must Become 120
You advise the student editorial board of a college English magazine. A 180-word draft editorial must be cut to 120 words before the printer's deadline, and the board's rule is that only whole sentences may be removed, never rewritten. The argument is: the college library should extend its evening hours during exam weeks. Three sentences are candidates for deletion. S3: "In 2023 the library closed at 5 p.m. on 41 of the 60 exam-week days." S6: "Students who study late are, to put it mildly, burning the midnight oil." S8: "A closed library is, in effect, a locked door in front of every student who works in the evening." The chair wants S8 cut because it "repeats the thesis"; a second member wants S6 cut because it is "too informal for an editorial". The draft also opens: "Having surveyed 300 students last term, late closing is clearly popular."
1. Which single sentence should be cut first to protect the argument, and how do you answer the chair's objection that S8 merely repeats the thesis?
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S6 is the first cut. Test each sentence against a function: S3 supplies the only evidence in the paragraph (a countable fact, 41 of 60 days); S8 supplies the inference that links that evidence to the recommendation; S6 supplies neither evidence nor inference, only decoration. A sentence that could be deleted from any editorial on any topic is doing no argumentative work.
The chair's objection has some force but is misplaced. S8 does echo the thesis, yet it does so in the form of a reason: it converts a statistic into a consequence for a named group ("every student who works in the evening"). The thesis says extend the hours; S8 says why the closure costs someone something. That is a premise, not a repetition.
The second member's reason for cutting S6 is weaker than the conclusion it supports. Informality alone is not disqualifying in a student editorial; idiom is acceptable if it earns its place. The real ground for cutting S6 is that the idiom is untranslatable for a bilingual readership and adds nothing checkable. Cutting it solves the register worry and the word count simultaneously.
2. Identify the grammatical fault in the opening sentence and produce a corrected version that keeps the survey as the basis of the claim.
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The opening contains a dangling modifier. "Having surveyed 300 students last term" is a participial phrase, and the subject that follows the comma must be the entity that did the surveying. As written, the subject is "late closing", so the sentence literally credits late closing with having conducted a survey. Readers stumble because the intended agent, the editorial board, never appears.
Two repairs are available. The first makes the board the subject: "Having surveyed 300 students last term, we found that late closing is clearly popular." The second keeps the survey as a noun phrase and drops the participle: "In a survey of 300 students last term, late closing was clearly popular." The second is shorter and better suited to a 120-word limit, but it hides who did the work. In a student publication the first is preferable, because readers will ask on what authority the claim rests.
Either way the vocabulary of certainty should be examined. "Clearly popular" outruns a single self-selected survey of 300 students, so "was favoured by most of those surveyed" is more defensible and costs only a few words.
3. If the board must cut a second sentence after S6, should it cut S3 or S8? Argue the trade-off rather than naming a winner outright.
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The choice is between evidence and inference, and the cost falls in different places.
Cutting S3 leaves a paragraph that asserts a problem and recommends a remedy without any measured basis. The editorial would still read smoothly, but every claim about the scale of the problem would rest on the writer's impression. For an editorial whose entire purpose is to ask an institution to change a timetable, losing the only number makes the request easy to refuse: the librarian can reply that no evidence of demand was offered.
Cutting S8 leaves the evidence intact but removes the step that shows why 41 closed days matter to a student. The reader is handed a statistic and expected to supply the consequence. This is a smaller loss, because the consequence is easy to infer and the recommendation is already stated.
So the asymmetry favours cutting S8. The defensible rule is: preserve what a hostile reader could dispute with data, sacrifice what a sympathetic reader can reconstruct. On that rule S3 stays and S8 goes, and the chair's instinct is right for the wrong reason.