Week 4: Editing | Nov. 27-Dec. 3

Editing Assignment #1

Last week, you produced a draft of your op-ed article. This week, after getting some editorial distance from it, you are ready to begin the process of editing the article.

Make a reverse outline of your article to judge its basic structure and theme. Be sure to do an essentialized outline to capture the basic logic of the piece. Do not look at your original skeleton outline, but try to judge the structure of the article as written, not as you intended it to be written. (Remember Dr. Peikoff’s advice to imagine that it was written by someone you vaguely dislike.)

Remember that a reverse outline should include a statement of the subject, theme and element of contrast that you identify in the article. Again, the goal here is to identify the subject, contrast and theme that you identify in the draft article–not the subject contrast and theme that you intended for the article. Part of what you need to judge is whether the article as written actually has the subject, contrast and theme that you had intended. 

Using your reverse outline, write a critical assessment of your article in no more than 400 words. Does it convey its theme? Is it clear? Is it objective? Does it take into account the context of the audience and is the heavy lifting appropriately allocated given the audience context?

Expect that your assessment will primarily concern the issues from Layer 1 of editing–i.e., overall structure and theme–but if you notice problems at the paragraph by paragraph and sentence by sentence levels, you can mention them also, but not at length.

DUE: Sunday, 11:59 pm your local time.