Newspaperlessness

Willpower as Medicine

The doctor’s goal in end-of-life care should be to facilitate the patient’s end-of-life goals.

For too long, we’ve phrased the question as one with only two answers: fight a losing battle, or quit.

If neither choice is right, maybe we can ask the patient to name some alternatives better suited to her own situation.

We have failed to recognize that dying people have priorities that they could communicate to us, besides just living longer, if we would only ask them.

What are you willing to sacrifice to make the most of your last days is the essential question.

For one patient of our acquaintance that meant trading length of life for richness of final days. Failing to meet her request would have been shameful.

They say beer is liquid bread. I don’t know who they are; after enough beer they all look alike. But they have a point. The same ingredients that make good beer—water, grain, sugar, and yeast—make good bread, or cookies, except the proportions differ, and the cooking methods. Oh, and there’s the hops. All right, maybe it’s a stretch.

Regardless, today we’ll try to take the ingredients for a lovely and emotional opinion piece and reshape them into an effective Editorial cupcake. With luck, the practice will prepare you for your A04: Editorial Rewrite. Happy baking.

Your fourth writing assignment is the rewrite of your third: an Editorial Rewrite that responds to feedback from your instructor, your classmates, your trusted advisers, or the free student tutors at the Writing Center.

Here’s the schedule:

• TUE-THU class:
  • Deadline 11:59PM MON OCT 13
• MON-WED class:
  • Deadline 11:59PM SUN OCT 12

To complete the assignment, you’ll publish a New Post, and save it to two categries (A04: Editorial Rewrite, and your username).

What Happens Next
Since you’ve already received feedback on your A03: Editorial assignment, you’ll start immediately to improve your editorial without further interference. However, for students who request it after doing substantial revisions themselves, I will be delighted to engage in additional feedback sessions in person or through the established blog practice of responding to requests for “feedback please.” Feedback begins with general and structural comments (many of which you have received), then graduates to the specific and detailed. We’ll save grammar, spelling, and sentence structure corrections to the end, once we’re fairly certain your letter is stable, at least for now. Revisions can and should continue even after next week’s posting deadline.

You will receive a numerical grade (translatable to a letter grade) following the posting of your A04. Until your argument achieves a letter grade of C, you’ll be told it’s Not Ready for Portfolio. Once it’s good enough to earn a C, it will be deemed Portfolio Ready, but always still improvable. You’ll have until early December to make it the best it can be.

• Post in the new A04: Editorial Rewrite category, and your username
• Give your Editorial a Title
• Failure to post the assignment on time will result in a grade of 0/100.
• Shorter Arguments grade category (20%)
• TUE-THU class:
  • Deadline 11:59PM MON OCT 13
• • MON-WED class:
  • Deadline 11:59PM SUN OCT 12

• Uncategorized Mechanics
• Eliminate Tags
• A04: Editorial Rewrite Assignment
• There is no right time for it is
• Writing Workshop: Cookies, Bread, and Beer
• The Best Possible Day

I could assign the same homework every day and never be wrong to require your constant effort to achieve brevity and clarity. Strunk and White, the authors of The Elements of Style, famously offered the essential writers’ advice in language that proves its own effectiveness:

Omit needless words.

I need more from you than that, but it’s a very good start.

After reading my other post, “Brevity and Clarity. The Short Sentence,” and following the example offered there, collect a paragraph of any of your classmates’ A03 assignment and edit it as I have demonstrated, to eliminate repetition and wordiness, and to reduce the paragraph to its essentials.

ASSIGNMENT DETAILS

1. Publish under the title: Brevity TR—Username (substituting your username of course).
2. Copy and paste another student’s paragraph from an A03 assignment into your post.
3. Revise the paragraph for brevity and clarity.
4. Use blockquotes if possible.
5. Categorize your post as Brevity MW and in your username.
6. DEADLINE: 11:59PM WED OCT 08.

• There is no right time for it is
• Brevity and Clarity
• The Short Sentence
• HW Brevity TR

Sentence structure carries your heavy luggage. If you phrase your good ideas well, your reader hands the bags to the bellhop who takes them to the room, opens the drapes, points out the minibar, and makes the room instantly comprehensible to your guest. If your sentences are vague or confusing, your reader lugs the bags up the service stairs and finds that the card key doesn’t match the door to the room.

The most common impediment to understanding is the failure to identify clearly Who is doing What to Whom in your sentences. Empty phrases that sound like communication more often fail to convey anything at all. They include:

—There is / There are
—It is
—This means / That means / That is
—By . . . it

The Reader Carries Her Bags

There is mounting concern about the recent Ebola outbreak, as there should be. There is much more the government could be doing than it is currently proposing to do. The president proposes conducting more efficient screenings for the disease in the United States, when really there should be equal concern on taking care of other countries affected.

There is a temple on Staten Island who has decided to make Liberia a main concern of theirs. There are many members of the temple that have family there who are suffering from this awful disease. They are trying to come up with the money to send an ambulance over seas. This would not only be helpful to their family members in need, but to the US as well.

By sending help to the countries where Ebola has already been spread, it will prevent the expansion over to America. It will be most effective to treat this disease at its source. If that is done then Americans will not have to worry about it traveling across seas and then can just be concerned with their own people.

Ah, Service!

Americans are increasingly and correctly concerned that our government is not doing enough to protect us from the growing Ebola outbreak. The president’s proposal to conduct more efficient screenings for Ebola in the United States ignores the need to eradicate the disease where it originates.

A temple on Staten Island has adopted Liberia as its main concern. a main concern of theirs. The many members with family in Liberia suffering from the awful disease are raising money to send an ambulance to their homeland. Any success they achieve in helping their family members will benefit the US as well.

Stemming the epidemic in countries where Ebola has already taken hold by combating the disease at its source will prevent the expansion to America. Once the epidemic is contained, we can concentrate our effort of reacting to the few stray cases that have sneaked through our defenses.