Editing a Scholarship Essay Under a Time Limit
A candidate is editing a 500-word argumentative draft about requiring a financial literacy course. The draft includes these sentences: Each of the required workshops offer students practical budgeting practice. The committee praised the program, they said it should be expanded. Students who complete the course are more confident, this confidence helps them avoid debt. The program's goal is to teach students that they should not spend more than they earn, and it also gives them a budgeting app. The writer wants to preserve a formal but accessible tone. The rubric penalizes errors that interfere with clarity but rewards varied sentence structure. The writer has 12 minutes to edit and must decide whether to fix every error or prioritize two sentences. The draft will be read by a scholarship committee.
1. Which sentence should be revised first because it most interferes with clarity, and what is the revision?
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Revise the third sentence first: 'Students who complete the course are more confident, this confidence helps them avoid debt.' It contains a comma splice, and 'this confidence' is a vague pointer that makes the causal link unclear. A clean revision is: 'Students who complete the course report greater confidence, and that confidence can help them avoid debt.' This fixes the run-on and clarifies what the confidence does. The first sentence's subject-verb agreement error is real, but readers can still parse it; the comma splice more directly interferes with clarity, which the rubric penalizes. The second sentence's pronoun issue is also worth fixing, but it is a secondary edit under a 12-minute limit.
2. Fix the subject-verb agreement and pronoun agreement in the first two sentences and explain the rule in context.
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First sentence: 'Each of the required workshops offers students practical budgeting practice.' The subject is 'Each,' which is singular, so the verb must be 'offers,' not 'offer'; 'of the required workshops' is a prepositional phrase and does not change the subject. Second sentence: 'The committee praised the program and said it should be expanded.' In formal American English, 'committee' is treated as a singular collective noun, so 'it' is preferable to 'they.' Combining the clauses with 'and' also removes the comma splice. If the writer wanted to emphasize that committee members disagreed, 'they' could be defended, but the draft gives no such signal and the tone is formal.
3. Revise the fourth sentence to reduce wordiness while keeping the meaning.
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Revision: 'The program teaches students not to spend more than they earn and provides a budgeting app.' The original buries the action in 'goal is to teach' and adds a second clause with 'it also gives them.' The revision uses two parallel verbs, 'teaches' and 'provides,' and cuts the empty phrase 'goal is.' It keeps both meanings: the spending rule and the app. A slightly more formal version is: 'The program teaches students to spend no more than they earn and supplies a budgeting app.' Either version reduces wordiness without changing the claim; the writer should choose one and check that the surrounding sentences do not repeat 'budgeting.'