Writing Standards: Clear and Coherent Writing (CCSS.W.11-12.4)
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Common Core High School ELA › Writing Standards: Clear and Coherent Writing (CCSS.W.11-12.4)
Task: Methods section for a peer-reviewed sociology article on city-level participatory budgeting and voter turnout. Audience: expert reviewers and readers trained in social science methods. Purpose: document data sources, variables, design, and analytic strategy precisely for evaluation and replication. Writing sample needing revision: We checked out a bunch of cities from the last few years and noticed that when a city did participatory budgeting, people kind of got more excited and voted more, which is neat. We mostly looked online and used what was easiest to get. We compared before and after and did some graphs to show the vibes. Our hunch is that meetings make folks feel heard, so they vote, which is common sense. We tried not to overcomplicate the analysis and did a basic comparison that seems fair. Also, we are confident the findings generalize because lots of places are similar and people everywhere want a say. The methods are straightforward enough that anyone can see we did the right thing.
Which revision best adapts the methods section to the scholarly task, purpose, and expert audience?
We explain in accessible language that cities with participatory budgeting had higher voting enthusiasm, as shown by simple before and after graphs. Because the audience is broad, we avoid technical detail that might confuse readers and emphasize intuitive reasoning about why meetings help turnout.
This study leverages a paradigmatic post-positivist praxeology to interrogate civic habitus across multiscalar urbanities, implementing a novel polyrhythmic analytics that supersedes conventional causal frameworks. The sample is extensive and representative by construction, thus inferential validity is assumed.
We conducted a quasi-experimental difference-in-differences analysis using panel data from 2010–2022 for 42 U.S. municipalities adopting participatory budgeting and matched non-adopters (N = 84). Turnout was measured as the percent of registered voters casting ballots in municipal elections; participatory budgeting status was coded by adoption year from city records. Models include city and year fixed effects, demographic covariates, and cluster-robust standard errors at the city level. We test for parallel pretrends and perform sensitivity checks excluding staggered adopters. Data and code are archived to enable replication.
We combine a brief description of our comparison with a persuasive summary recommending that cities adopt participatory budgeting to boost turnout, noting that citizens feel more heard and democracy is improved. The section closes with policy suggestions for mayors and councils.
Explanation
Choice C aligns with a peer-reviewed methods section by specifying data, variables, design, identification strategy, diagnostics, and reproducibility while maintaining clarity and coherence. A prioritizes accessibility over methodological precision. B uses dense jargon without necessary methodological detail. D shifts to advocacy and recommendations, undermining the section's purpose.
Task: Professional email to a hospital Institutional Review Board requesting approval of a minor protocol amendment. Audience: IRB administrators and reviewers. Purpose: identify the protocol precisely, describe the change, justify it, and assess risk and compliance. Writing sample needing revision: Hi IRB Team, Hope things are great. We are doing some tweaks to our study because the app we use just pushed an update and it would be awesome if we could roll with it right away. Everyone loves the new interface. We will probably recruit a few more people, but nothing big. Our team is super careful, and we promise not to do anything sketchy. We will send documents later, once we finish them. Could you approve this quickly because our timeline is tight and the grant wants us to move faster. Let me know if you have questions, but I am in and out of meetings all week so email is best.
Which revision best adapts the email to the task, purpose, and expert audience?
Dear IRB Office, I am writing to request an expedited review of a minor amendment to Protocol 21-4519. The change adds the vendor's updated mobile interface and clarifies two survey items; study procedures, inclusion criteria, and data security are unchanged. Risk remains minimal. Redlined consent, revised instruments, and the vendor's HIPAA BAA are attached. Justification: improved usability and reduced completion time. No new identifiers will be collected. Please advise if this qualifies for expedited Category 5; we are available for questions and can implement only after approval.
Protocol 21-4519: change interface; add 2 questions; recruit +25. Risk same. Attachments forthcoming. Need approval ASAP. Confirm expedited? Thanks.
Hey there, super sorry for all the bother. We know everyone is slammed. We really did not plan for this, but the update just happened, and we feel terrible about asking for a favor. If you could help us out, we would be forever grateful. We will try to get you documents soon.
Great news: our app has an exciting new look that participants will love, and it will make our institution shine. We want to move fast to keep momentum and hit grant milestones. Please greenlight the upgrade so we can keep our stakeholders thrilled.
Explanation
Choice A provides precise identifiers, clear description and justification of changes, risk assessment, attachments, and regulatory framing, matching professional IRB expectations while remaining concise. B is terse and omits rationale and attachments. C adopts an apologetic tone that obscures purpose and professionalism. D uses marketing language and fails to address compliance needs.
Task: Technical note reporting a machine learning benchmark update to an open-source consortium. Audience: engineers and researchers familiar with evaluation protocols. Purpose: concisely summarize setup, metrics, results, and reproducibility details relevant to experts. Writing sample needing revision: Our new model absolutely crushes the old ones. We tried it on some common datasets and the numbers jumped in the right direction, which should convince people it is better. We tweaked a bunch of knobs until it felt good and then ran some tests on a big GPU. The figures look awesome, and the loss curve goes down fast. If others adopt our defaults, they will probably win leaderboards. We think the architecture is elegant and future proof, and everyone will want to use it once they see our graphs. The code is being cleaned up and will be posted later when we get a chance.
Which revision best adapts the benchmark report to the technical task, purpose, and expert audience?
We begin by explaining machine learning to newcomers, define basic terms like training and validation, and walk through step-by-step installation for users who are just getting started. This friendly guide avoids dense metric tables to keep things accessible.
Our architecture is a game changer that unlocks human-level intelligence. It outperforms everything by a mile and will transform the field. The figures clearly show dramatic superiority, so detailed numbers are unnecessary. Adoption is strongly recommended.
We provide a comprehensive dump of all hyperparameters, kernel logs, and every training curve for 50 runs. The note does not summarize results, since experts can read plots. Environment details are omitted to save space.
We evaluated v3.2 on ImageNet-1k and CIFAR-100 with the consortium's reference scripts. Top-1 accuracy improved by 1.3 and 2.1 points over v3.1 under identical data preprocessing and augmentation. We fixed seeds across 5 runs and report mean and standard deviation; ablations isolate the impact of the new optimizer. Training used 8 A100 GPUs; environment files and exact commit hashes are provided. Reproduction instructions and checkpoints are available in the repo.
Explanation
Choice D delivers a concise, structured summary of datasets, metrics, controls, variance, resources, and reproducibility artifacts, aligning with expert expectations while maintaining coherence. A targets novices and mismatches audience and purpose. B relies on hype and evades evidence. C overwhelms with uncurated detail and omits essential context and environment information.
Task: One-page briefing memo for a state transportation committee on congestion pricing options. Audience: policymakers with varied technical backgrounds. Purpose: neutrally present alternatives, fiscal and equity impacts, implementation considerations, and an evidence-based recommendation. Writing sample needing revision: Traffic is bad because people keep driving when they should not, and the fairest solution is to make driving expensive in downtown areas. Voters are frustrated and sick of delays, so the legislature should stand up to special interests and pass a bold plan right now. The data prove that tolls reduce driving, and opponents are just spreading fear. We can use cameras, apps, and some basic math to figure out who should pay more. If we act fast, we can send a message that we take climate change seriously. The memo should inspire courage, not drown the reader in details or tradeoffs. Let us do what is obviously right.
Which revision best adapts the memo to the policy analysis task, purpose, and audience?
The memo focuses on statutory authority and constitutional constraints, providing detailed legal citations and judicial history. Because legal validity is paramount, it does not discuss fiscal projections, distributional effects, or operational feasibility, which can be addressed later.
Executive summary: We compare cordon tolls, time-of-day pricing, and high-occupancy discounts. Net revenue ranges from 220 to 380 million annually, with 15–25 percent reinvested in transit per statute. Modeling indicates 8–12 percent peak delay reduction. Distributional analysis shows higher burdens on suburban commuters; mitigation options include low-income credits and employer transit subsidies. Implementation would proceed via a one-year pilot, phased enforcement, and clear metrics. Recommendation: adopt time-of-day pricing with targeted offsets. Uncertainty and data needs are noted.
The memo emphasizes that regular people are tired of gridlock and will support leaders who show backbone. It avoids technocratic jargon, uses persuasive anecdotes, and calls out bad actors who resist change.
A table of baseline and post-policy flows by segment and hour is provided with minimal narrative, followed by a model specification appendix. The committee can infer impacts from the numbers; interpretation is not included to avoid bias.
Explanation
Choice B presents alternatives, quantified impacts, equity considerations, implementation steps, a cautious recommendation, and uncertainties, matching policy memo expectations for clarity and balance. A narrows to legal analysis and omits core policy tradeoffs. C adopts op-ed rhetoric unsuited to a briefing. D is technically detailed but reduces overall effectiveness by withholding synthesis and interpretation needed by policymakers.
Intended audience: peer-reviewed literary studies journal. Task: argue about narrative unreliability in modernist fiction while engaging scholarship.
Draft: Modernist novels are kind of tricky because narrators are often unreliable, which makes them fun and confusing. When I read The Good Soldier and Mrs Dalloway, I felt that the authors were playing with readers. I think unreliable narrators are important because they make us question truth. A lot of critics have said similar things, but I want to show that unreliability is everywhere and that it breaks the fourth wall. Also, the way the stories are told is cool because sometimes we are inside a character and sometimes we are not. In my paper I will talk about these books and probably Heart of Darkness too and explain how the authors trick us. This will prove that modernists wanted to destabilize reality and that we should read them that way.
Which revision best adapts the draft to a peer-reviewed literary studies journal by aligning thesis, tone, and organization with scholarly expectations while maintaining clarity and coherence?
Reframe the paper with section headers like Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion, and describe how close reading was conducted as data collection, emphasizing stepwise procedures and reproducibility for each novel.
Advance a precise, arguable thesis that situates the essay within debates on diegesis and focalization, positing that selective disclosure in Ford and Woolf functions as an ethics of attention rather than mere destabilization; organize the argument by concept, engage representative scholarship, and hedge claims with textual evidence.
Adopt high-density critical jargon throughout, replacing terms like narrator and reader with polysyllabic coinages, minimize examples, and conclude with a sweeping claim that all modernism annihilates referentiality.
Revise for a general audience by removing references to scholarship, adding rhetorical questions to hook readers, and closing with a personal reflection on how unreliable narrators made the books feel more relatable.
Explanation
Choice B aligns with scholarly audience expectations by offering a nuanced, situated thesis, disciplinary vocabulary used purposefully, engagement with prior scholarship, and an organized, evidence-based structure. A imposes an inappropriate scientific format for a literary argument. C increases jargon but sacrifices coherence and argumentative clarity. D mismatches the advanced audience by privileging accessibility over scholarly engagement.
Context: Professional email to a municipal procurement director and city engineer, delivering structural assessment results for the East River footbridge and requesting authorization for interim mitigation and a follow-up meeting.
Draft: Hey team, hope your week is going awesome. I finally got around to the bridge report and it is kind of gnarly. There are some cracks that look bad and some bolts are sketchy. I took a bunch of pics and can send them if you want, and we should probably meet at some point. I think we can slap on some plates and see what happens, and then later do something bigger if needed. I am out Friday but maybe next week? Anyway, just wanted to get this off my plate and keep things moving. Let me know what works, thanks!
Which revision best matches a professional, discipline-aware email to a municipal audience by conveying findings, risk, next steps, and a clear request while remaining concise and coherent?
Provide a deep dive into stress-intensity factors, present nominal and ultimate capacities with partial safety factors, cite multiple subsections of structural code, and include derivations that may be unfamiliar to nonengineers on the thread.
Keep the tone personable and upbeat, describe the site visit in narrative detail, include a brief anecdote about the weather, and suggest that the meeting can be informal with coffee and a walk-through sometime soon.
Use a bullet list of observed deficiencies and photos, but omit a specific request, timeline, and decision points to avoid sounding prescriptive in front of city staff.
Subject line: East River Footbridge assessment summary and request. Opening sentence states purpose. Summarize critical findings with a qualitative risk rating, reference the attached report and photo appendix, recommend interim shoring within 10 days and design of a permanent fix within 30 days, specify required authorization, propose two meeting times, and provide a direct contact for questions.
Explanation
Choice D delivers a clear purpose, concise summary of findings, defined actions and timelines, and a specific request tailored to a mixed municipal audience. A overwhelms nontechnical stakeholders and mismatches the email context. B maintains rapport but undermines professional register and task focus. C organizes information but omits the actionable ask, reducing effectiveness.
Context: Conference abstract for a computational linguistics proceedings, reporting a supervised classifier for detecting harassment in code-mixed social media.
Draft: Online harassment is a huge problem and our work will finally solve it. We trained a model that is super accurate on lots of posts where people mix languages, and it turns out the model basically understands context like a human. We downloaded some tweets and scraped other sites, then threw different models at it until something worked. The results were very promising and we think moderators will love this, plus it will make platforms more ethical. In the paper we will talk about the big picture and show some examples of mean posts the model caught. This is a major contribution that could end abuse online if adopted widely.
Which revision most appropriately adapts the abstract to an expert research audience by emphasizing method, data, results, and limitations with precise, nonhyped claims?
We introduce a supervised classifier for harassment detection in code-mixed microtexts. Using a 120k-post corpus with human annotations across three language pairs, we compare transformer baselines with a domain-adapted model fine-tuned on stratified folds. The best model achieves macro F1 of 0.84, improving 6 points over a strong baseline, with largest gains on intra-sentential switches. Error analysis shows confusion among reclaimed slurs. We release preprocessing scripts and discuss annotation bias and portability limits.
We open with the societal harm of harassment, underscore the urgency of solutions, and highlight that our system is a game changer poised to transform moderation. We focus on inspirational implications and defer technical specifics to the full paper to keep the abstract readable.
We expand the background section with an exhaustive literature overview, detailing prior datasets and taxonomies at length, and then briefly mention that our model performed well, saving the numerical results for the talk.
We pivot from reporting experiments to advocating for platform regulation, urging policy changes based on our findings and dedicating most of the abstract to a call for action and stakeholder commitments.
Explanation
Choice A reflects research norms: clear problem statement, dataset characteristics, comparative method, specific metrics, error analysis, and limitations. B and D substitute advocacy and hype for methods and results. C overemphasizes background at the expense of core contributions and concrete findings.
Context: Policy memo to a state education committee analyzing K–3 class size caps, comparing policy options, costs, and expected outcomes, and offering an evidence-based recommendation.
Draft: We should absolutely shrink class sizes because it is the right thing to do for kids. Anyone who has been in a crowded classroom can see how unfair it is. Teachers are overworked, and smaller classes will obviously help them and make learning better. Politicians always say they care about children, so this is their chance to prove it. We should pass a strict cap immediately and stop arguing about money, because long-term benefits cannot be priced. I talked to a few parents who agreed with me, and my own experience shows that small groups feel more supportive. The memo should send a clear message: act now.
Which revision best adapts the memo to a governmental policy context by presenting options, criteria, trade-offs, and a defensible recommendation with clear structure and neutral tone?
Adopt an advocacy voice that frames the issue as a moral imperative, emphasizes urgency over analysis, and uses emotionally charged anecdotes to rally support for the strictest cap possible regardless of cost.
Use highly formal legal language with extended statutory citations and complex syntax to project authority, even if the memo becomes difficult to parse for nonlawyers on the committee.
State the decision context and objectives, define evaluation criteria such as cost per student, projected achievement effects, and staffing feasibility, compare three options (strict cap, phased cap, targeted cap for high-need schools) with evidence from meta-analyses and state pilots, note fiscal and workforce constraints, and recommend a phased cap with targeted supports, outlining implementation steps and monitoring.
Present a large appendix of district-level statistics without synthesis, followed by an unstructured narrative of teacher testimonials that the committee can interpret on its own.
Explanation
Choice C meets policy analysis expectations by clarifying objectives and criteria, comparing feasible options with evidence, acknowledging constraints, and offering an implementable recommendation in neutral language. A mismatches the governmental audience with advocacy rhetoric. B sacrifices clarity for formality. D supplies data without coherence or decision guidance.