Rhetorical Situation

This passage was written for this course. It imagines a letter that a surveyor in western Pennsylvania writes in 1794 to his son, who has asked to leave his apprenticeship as a surveyor and study law in Philadelphia.

My dear Samuel,

Your letter reached me at Turtle Creek, where I am running the lines of a tract that three men claim and none of them has seen. You ask my leave to give up the chain and the compass and go to the city to read law. You say that surveying is dull, that it is only walking and counting, and that a young man of sense should not spend his life measuring other men's land. I have read your letter twice, once as your father and once as a surveyor, and I will answer it both ways.

As your father, I give you leave. You are nineteen, and I was not much older when I left my own father's farm against his wishes. I will not pretend that I would be glad to lose your help this season, for the woods are wet and the work is behind. But a man should choose his labor, and I would rather you were a willing lawyer than an unwilling surveyor.

As a surveyor, I must tell you that you are mistaken about the work, and I would not have you leave it for a wrong reason. It is walking and counting. So is reading, if you look at it that way: the eye walks along the line and the mind counts the words. What matters is what the walking is for.

Consider what I am doing at Turtle Creek. Three men hold three deeds to the same hill. One deed was written in 1769 and calls for a corner at “a large white oak by a spring.” The oak is gone; there are a dozen springs. Another calls for a line “running north to the river,” but the compass of 1769 and the compass of today do not point to the same north, for the needle wanders a little every year, and the man who wrote the deed did not trouble to say which north he meant. The third deed was drawn by a clerk in Philadelphia who had never crossed the mountains and who placed the river a mile from where God put it.

None of these men is a villain. Each believes the hill is his, and each will be ruined if he is wrong. Before I came, they had settled the matter twice with fists and once with a rifle, and it was only the poor aim of the rifleman that spared us a funeral. When I have finished, there will be one line on one map, and the three of them will go to court with it, and the lawyers will argue about it, and the judge will rule upon it. But the line will be mine. Every argument they make will begin with the work you call dull.

I do not say this to keep you. I say it so that you will know what you are leaving. The law that you wish to study is written on paper, but it is about the earth: about who may plant what and where, and who must leave. A lawyer who has never stood in the mud and looked for an oak that is not there will believe the paper too easily. I have known such men. They are clever, and they do a great deal of harm.

So go to Philadelphia, if you still wish it, with my blessing and with what money I can spare. But go knowing that the map is not the country, and that someone must walk the country before the map can be drawn. If you become a lawyer, be the kind who asks who walked it.

Your affectionate father, Josiah Ward

This passage was written for this course. It imagines an editorial that a small-town newspaper publishes in 1886, after the town council has replaced the gas lamps on Main Street with electric arc lights.

On Monday evening, at a quarter past six, the new electric lights on Main Street were lit for the first time, and the town turned out to see them. We were there ourselves. We will not pretend we were unmoved. The lamps came on all at once, with a sound like a struck match drawn out into a hum, and the street that had been a row of yellow pools between the dark became a single white room, from the depot to the bridge. Children read the signs aloud. A dog, unaccountably, began to bark at the hardware store. Several gentlemen took out their watches and read them by the light, for no reason that we could see except that they could.

We supported the council's vote, and we support it still. The gas lamps were dim, costly, and dangerous; we have reported on three fires they caused in as many years. The lamplighter, Mr. Hollis, who has climbed his ladder at dusk for twenty-two winters, has been given a position at the new plant, and we are told that he does not mind. The merchants report that customers linger later. The constable reports that he has less to do. These are real goods, and a newspaper that scorned them would deserve to be ignored.

And yet we confess to a small regret, which we offer not as an argument but as a record, since it is the business of a newspaper to keep records.

From our office window on Tuesday night we looked for the Dipper, which has hung over the bank roof for as long as this paper has been printed. It was not there. That is to say, it was there, as it has been since before there was a bank or a roof, but we could not see it. Neither could we see the river of small stars that used to run east from the steeple on clear nights in August. The electric light does not dim the stars; it only drowns them, the way a band drowns a conversation. The stars go on talking. We have simply lost the ability to hear.

It will be said that no one needs the stars any longer. The sailor has his charts, the farmer his almanac, and the rest of us have the clock on the courthouse. This is true. We do not need the stars to tell us the hour or the season. But we have noticed that people do not look at a thing only because they need it. Our grandfathers looked up on winter nights because the sky was there and it was large and they were small, and it did them no harm to be reminded of it. A town that can see only itself at night may come to think rather too well of itself by day.

We do not propose that the lamps be taken down. We propose something more modest: that the council consider turning off the lamps on the side streets after midnight, when there is no one about but cats and the constable, and that the people of this town walk out, now and then, past the last lamp on the river road, where the dark still begins. It is a short walk. The Dipper will be waiting.

This passage was written for this course. It imagines an essay that a high school mathematics teacher publishes in a city magazine in 1974, during a gasoline shortage, about riding a bicycle to work.

I bought the bicycle in November, the week the lines at the gas station on Fuller Avenue began to stretch around the block. I did not buy it out of virtue. I bought it because I had spent forty minutes in that line on a Tuesday morning, reading the bumper sticker on the car ahead of me until I knew it by heart, and I arrived at school after the first bell to find my homeroom holding an election for class president without me. I was not, I learned, a candidate.

The bicycle is green, secondhand, and heavier than it looks. It has three speeds, of which I use two. The third, I have decided, is for people with something to prove.

I expected to save money, and I have, although less than I hoped; the savings on gasoline have gone, almost to the penny, into a raincoat, a set of lights, and a quantity of doughnuts that I do not intend to discuss. I expected to get exercise, and I have, although the four miles to school are mostly downhill and the four miles home are mostly not, so that I arrive at work cheerful and at home in a state that my wife describes as “thoughtful.” What I did not expect was to learn the city.

For eleven years I had driven the same route to school: Fuller to the parkway, the parkway to Grant Street, four lights, one left turn. I could have told you the time it took to the minute. I could not have told you what was on the corners. In a car, the city is something you pass through on the way to somewhere else, a corridor with billboards. On a bicycle it becomes a place. I have learned that there is a bakery on Ninth Street that opens at five and gives yesterday's rolls to anyone who asks. I have learned which dogs on Hollis Avenue are serious. I know the man who sweeps the steps of the Lutheran church every morning, not by name, but well enough that we nod, and on the one morning he was not there, I worried about him all through second period.

I do not want to make too much of this. A bicycle is not a philosophy, and there are mornings in February when it is not even a pleasure. I have been splashed by buses, honked at by taxis, and once, memorably, chased for half a block by a goose that had wandered up from the river and taken a dislike to me. Some of my colleagues, who live farther out, could not ride to school if they wanted to, and I would not suggest that they try. The shortage will end, and when it does, most of us will go back to our cars, and the lines will disappear, and I suspect I will drive on the coldest days myself.

But I will not go back entirely. I have spent eleven years teaching students that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, and I still believe it. What I had not considered is that the shortest distance is not always the one you want. Some routes are worth taking because of what lies along them. I would not have learned that in a car, and I am not sure I would have learned it at all if a stranger's bumper sticker had not made me late.

The following is a draft of an essay a student is writing for an English class assignment that asks students to argue for a change to the school's reading list. It may need revision.

(1) Every book on Lincoln High School's ninth-grade reading list was written in English, most of them by American authors. (2) There are nine of them, from a novel set in the Dust Bowl to a play about a family in Chicago, and all nine are worth reading. (3) I think the reading list could maybe be changed in some ways.

(4) The first reason to change it is simple. (5) Most of the world's great books were not written in English. (6) A list made only of English-language books shows students one corner of literature and calls it the whole. (7) Students who never read a translated book in school may grow up assuming that little worth reading was written anywhere else.

(8) Translated books can also speak directly to students' lives. (9) Last year my cousin's class in Riverside read a novel, translated from Spanish, about a girl who interprets for her parents at the doctor's office and the bank. (10) Many students at Lincoln do the same thing for their own families.

(11) Some teachers, who are probably just stuck in their ways, worry that translations lose too much of the original. (12) They are partly right, a translation can never match its original word for word. (13) A good translation keeps the story, the characters, and the questions the book raises, and those are what a ninth-grade class spends most of its time discussing.

(14) Adding translated books would not mean removing all of the English ones, and no teacher would have to give up every favorite. (15) The list could keep six of its current books. (16) It could add three translated ones. (17) Students would still read the American classics, and they would also meet writers from Nigeria, Japan, and Chile, whose books are read by millions of people around the world.

(18) That is my opinion about the reading list.

The following is a draft of a post a student intern is writing for the blog of a museum of farm life, introducing a new exhibit on windmills and weather vanes. It may need revision.

(1) Before power lines reached the Great Plains, many farm families depended on the wind for two things: water and warnings about the weather. (2) Some of the machines they used still stand on the farms where they were built, and a few of them still work. (3) Our new exhibit, "Reading the Wind," opens on April 5 and shows how those families put the wind to use.

(4) The tall steel windmills that still dot the Plains were not built to make electricity. (5) As the wind turned the blades, a reciprocating sucker rod actuated a cylinder pump submerged in the well casing. (6) They pumped water. (7) Every ranch in the West had at least three windmills. (8) A single windmill could keep a stock tank full through a dry summer, as long as the wind kept blowing.

(9) Weather vanes did a different job. (10) A farmer who saw the vane swing around to the northwest on a warm afternoon knew that colder air, and perhaps a storm, could be on its way. (11) Vanes were also really pretty. (12) Each was made to be read from far across a field, so its shape had to be simple and bold. (13) The exhibit includes a fish, a running horse, and a copper rooster from a barn in Kansas, along with a dozen other vanes lent by local families.

(14) For example, the wind turbines rising across the Plains look nothing like the old farm windmills, but they rely on the same idea: the wind does the work so that people do not have to. (15) The exhibit ends with a turbine blade forty feet long, on loan from a wind farm in western Kansas and so large that it fills the length of the gallery.

(16) The museum is open every day except Monday, and children under twelve are admitted free with an adult. (17) We hope you will visit.

The following is a draft of a speech a student is preparing to give to her school board, asking the board to pay for the care of the high school's historical records. It may need revision.

(1) Good evening, members of the board. (2) My name is Lena Ortiz and I am the editor of the Westbrook High School newspaper the Westbrook Herald. (3) Last spring, while I was looking for a photograph for our centennial issue, I found more than ninety years of the school's records in cardboard boxes under the auditorium stage. (4) There were yearbooks, programs from school plays, letters from graduates who served overseas in the Second World War, and the minutes of the first student council, written in pencil in 1931. (5) Several of the boxes had been sitting in water from a leaking pipe, and the yearbooks at the bottom were already swollen and stuck together.

(6) I am asking the board to set aside 4,000 dollars to protect these records before more of them are lost. (7) The money would buy acid-free boxes and folders, a set of metal shelves for a dry room on the second floor, and a scanner so that the most fragile papers can be copied. (8) It would also pay a trained archivist to spend two days teaching student volunteers how to sort and label what we have, so that the work can continue after she leaves.

(9) The board's job is to educate students, and these records can help it do that. (10) A history class could use the letters to study what the war meant to people from our own town, in their own words. (11) However, journalism students could compare how the Herald covered the same kinds of events across eight decades. (12) Plus, the records are really cool.

(13) Every year we wait, more of the paper is lost to damp, mold and mice. (14) The boxes that sat in water this year may not survive another wet spring. (15) Thank you for your time.

The following is a draft of a letter a student is writing to the editor of her town's newspaper about a proposal to start the high school day later. It may need revision.

To the Editor:

(1) Next month the Carver County school board will vote on whether to move the high school's start time from 7:20 to 8:10 a.m., a change the district has been studying for two years. (2) As a junior who catches the bus at 6:35 every morning, often before the sun is up, I hope the board says yes. (3) A later start would be good.

(4) During adolescence, the body's internal clock shifts later. (5) Many teenagers cannot fall asleep much before eleven at night. (6) The American Academy of Pediatrics has recommended that middle and high schools start no earlier than 8:30 a.m., and our current start is more than an hour earlier than that. (7) Sleep is important.

(8) In my first-period chemistry class, half the room is yawning before attendance is taken, and the other half is staring at the clock. (9) Last week a classmate dozed off during a lab and nearly knocked over a lit burner. (10) A student who is that tired is not learning much chemistry, no matter how good the teacher is.

(11) Some parents worry that a later start would push sports practices and games into the evening, when it is dark. (12) That concern is fair, and the board should take it seriously. (13) Therefore, several districts that have made the change have adjusted their practice schedules and kept their teams competitive in their leagues by holding some practices before school.

(14) Others point out that running the buses on a new schedule could cost the district money it does not have to spare. (15) Whatever, money isn't everything. (16) The district's transportation office estimates that the new schedule would add about two percent to the busing budget.

(17) Anyway, that's what I think.

Morgan Lee Carver County High School

The following is a draft of an article a student is writing for a community garden's newsletter, proposing that the garden keep a hive of honeybees. It may need revision.

(1) Bees are insects. (2) This spring, at its April meeting, the garden committee will decide whether to place a beehive in the far corner of the Elm Street Community Garden, near the compost bins, and I hope members will support the idea. (3) A hive would help our plants; teach our young gardeners; and cost the garden very little.

(4) Our squash, cucumbers and melons all depend on visiting insects, such as bees, to carry pollen from flower to flower, and without those visits the fruit does not form. (5) Last summer several gardeners found that their squash vines flowered well but produced little fruit, and a few gave up on squash altogether. (6) A hive of honeybees placed nearby would guarantee that every flower in the garden is pollinated.

(7) A hive would also give the garden's Saturday children's program, which drew forty children last year, something new to explore on summer mornings. (8) They could learn how a colony divides its work among nurses, builders and foragers. (9) Children could watch the bees safely, and up close, through a glass observation panel set into the side of the hive.

(10) The cost would be small. (11) The Riverside Beekeepers Club, which has kept hives in the city for thirty years, has offered to lend the garden a hive and to inspect it every two weeks at no charge. (12) The only expense would be protective veils, which are pretty cheap, like twenty bucks.

(13) Some members have said they are nervous about stings, especially near the children's beds by the gate. (14) Similarly, the hive would sit behind a six-foot fence at the far end of the garden, away from the paths. (15) Bees leaving the hive would rise over the fence and fly out well above people's heads before spreading out to forage.

This passage was written for this course. It imagines an address that a schoolmaster gives at a town meeting in a New England village in 1847, after a railroad company has proposed laying its line through the town.

Neighbors, I am told that when the turnpike was first cut past the Hollis farm, my grandfather stood at the end of his lane with a musket, not because he meant to fire it, but because he wished the surveyors to understand that he had an opinion. The turnpike came anyway. Within ten years he was driving his own cheeses over it to Worcester and complaining, as loudly as he had once complained of the road, that the tolls were too high. I mention him not to mock him. I mention him because I suspect that most of us in this hall tonight are his grandchildren in more than blood.

The objections to the railroad have been put to me with great earnestness, and some of them deserve more than a smile. The engines are loud, and they are dirty; Mrs. Pratt, whose house stands nearest the proposed line, has every right to ask who will pay for the washing of her linen. Sparks from passing engines have fired haystacks in towns to the east of us, and a cow on the track is a dead cow, whatever her owner's opinion of progress. Nor is it foolish to fear that a road which carries our butter to Boston in an afternoon will carry our sons there faster still, and keep them. I have taught too many boys their sums in this town not to feel that fear myself.

And yet I would ask you to notice what kind of objections these are. Nearly every one of them concerns how the railroad is to be built, not whether it shall come. A fence will keep a cow off the track. A company that wants our goodwill may be made to pay for that fence, and for a crossing at the mill road, and for a depot near enough to the village that the depot does not become the village. These are matters for bargaining, and a town that bargains early bargains well. The town that merely refuses will find, as my grandfather found, that its refusal is noted and ignored: the surveyors will move their stakes to the far side of the river, and the line will pass us by and make some other village rich instead.

I have sometimes thought that a railroad resembles nothing so much as a river. A river may flood a meadow or turn a mill, and which it does depends very little on the river and a great deal on the men who build along its banks. Our fathers did not leave the river alone because it rose every April. They dammed it and dug races and set wheels in it, and those wheels have fed this town for forty years. The iron road is a new river, one that runs not downhill but wherever money wishes it to run, and it will rise in its season like any other.

I therefore propose, not that we welcome the railroad, and not that we resist it, but that we meet it: that this meeting appoint a committee of five, tonight, to treat with the company's agent before his stakes are driven, and to set down in writing what the town requires. Let us ask for the fence and the crossing and the depot. Let us ask, too, that the line keep clear of the common, where our children skate and our dead are buried. If the company refuses all of this, we shall have learned what kind of neighbor it means to be, and we may oppose it then with clear consciences. But let us not stand at the end of the lane with a musket, having an opinion, while the road is laid past us.

This passage was written for this course. It imagines an essay that a high school English teacher writes for the opinion page of a regional newspaper, at a time when local schools are debating whether to keep teaching handwriting.

My father kept his grocery lists on the backs of envelopes, in a hand so slanted that the letters seemed to be walking into a strong wind. After he died, I found one in the pocket of his winter coat: eggs, coffee, the good bread, call Ruth. I have no idea whether he ever called Ruth. I kept the envelope anyway, and I have looked at it more often than I have looked at any photograph of him.

I begin with that envelope because I want to be honest about where my feelings on handwriting come from, and because I do not think those feelings settle anything. Sentiment is a poor basis for a school curriculum. Every generation mourns the tools it learned on; somewhere, I am sure, a scribe once grieved for the clay tablet. If the only case for teaching children to write by hand were that their grandparents did it, the case would be weak, and the hours spent on it would be better spent elsewhere.

Nor will I pretend that the keyboard has made us worse writers. It has made revision nearly free. A student who once would have handed in a smudged draft rather than recopy it can now move a paragraph in two keystrokes, and the essays I receive are, on the whole, longer and cleaner than the ones I received twenty years ago. For a finished piece of writing, something meant for another reader, I would not ask any student to give that up.

But a finished piece of writing is not the only kind there is. Before the essay comes the mess: the arrow from one idea to another, the question circled twice, the word crossed out and then, a minute later, rescued. This is the writing we do for ourselves, and here the pen has an advantage that has little to do with nostalgia. It is slow. Because a hand cannot keep pace with a lecture, a student taking notes by hand must decide, sentence by sentence, what matters; the student at a laptop can take down everything and decide nothing. The page, meanwhile, accepts whatever shape the thinking takes. A margin can hold a doubt. A box drawn around two words can say they belong together long before the writer could explain why.

I watched this happen last spring with a student I will call Dani, who had typed three drafts of an argument about her town's library and disliked all of them. I asked her to put the laptop away and draw her argument on a sheet of paper. She grumbled. Then she drew a crooked tree, with the library at the root and her reasons as branches, and within ten minutes she had noticed that two of her branches were the same branch. The fourth draft, which she typed, was good.

So I am not asking our schools to bring back penmanship drills, or to grade children on the elegance of their capital G. I am asking that they keep the pen within reach, and teach it well enough that it can be used without effort, as a tool for the stage of writing in which we do not yet know what we think. My father's envelope will never be an argument. But the hand that wrote it was thinking, and our children should learn to think that way too.

This passage was written for this course. It imagines an essay that a university professor who studies memory writes for a general-interest science magazine.

Every semester, a student stays after my first lecture to ask how she can stop forgetting things. She has usually just lost an argument with a textbook, or a name, or the location of her car keys, and she wants a technique. I give her a few. Then, because she has asked the wrong question and I am fond of her for asking it, I tell her that forgetting is not the opposite of memory. It is part of how memory works.

This sounds like the kind of thing a professor says to seem profound, so let me be concrete. Picture the parking lot where you left your car this morning. You can probably find the spot. Now try to recall where you parked on the third Tuesday of last month. Unless something unusual happened that day, the answer is gone, and good riddance. A brain that kept every parking space with equal vividness would present you, each evening, with hundreds of competing spots, and you would stand in the lot like a diner at a buffet who cannot choose. Losing the old spaces is what lets you find today's.

The same principle operates at larger scales. When you learn what a dog is, you do not store every dog you have met; you keep something like a sketch, and you let most of the particulars go. That loss is the price of the category. A child who remembered each dog perfectly, and could never let the details blur, might struggle to arrive at the idea of "dog" at all, because no two dogs would ever seem enough alike to share a name. To think, in this sense, is partly to forget.

Memory is also less like a filing cabinet than like a story retold. Each time we recall an experience, we rebuild it from pieces, and the rebuilt version is what we keep. This is why two siblings can remember the same holiday so differently, and why a story told often can drift away from the event it began as. That drift is unsettling. It means that the vivid scene you would swear to in a courtroom may have been quietly edited by the very act of remembering it. But the same flexibility lets old experience bend to fit new situations, so that what you learned in one kitchen helps you cook in another.

None of this is a reason to celebrate every lapse. Some forgetting is illness, and anyone who has watched a parent lose the names of her children knows that it is not a feature to be admired. Nor does the usefulness of forgetting excuse the student who never reviewed her notes. My claim is narrower. A healthy memory is selective by design, and its selection is not a flaw we tolerate but the work that memory exists to do.

So when the student asks how to stop forgetting, I suggest that she ask instead what she wants to keep. She can choose to return to a fact, to test herself on it, to connect it to something she already knows, and her brain will treat that fact as worth saving. The rest she can let go. The rest, after all, is mostly last month's parking spaces.

The following passage is from the opening chapter of Our National Parks, a book by the naturalist John Muir published in 1901.

The tendency nowadays to wander in wildernesses is delightful to see. Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life. Awakening from the stupefying effects of the vice of over-industry and the deadly apathy of luxury, they are trying as best they can to mix and enrich their own little ongoings with those of Nature, and to get rid of rust and disease. Briskly venturing and roaming, some are washing off sins and cobweb cares of the devil’s spinning in all-day storms on mountains; sauntering in rosiny pinewoods or in gentian meadows, brushing through chaparral, bending down and parting sweet, flowery sprays; tracing rivers to their sources, getting in touch with the nerves of Mother Earth; jumping from rock to rock, feeling the life of them, learning the songs of them, panting in whole-souled exercise, and rejoicing in deep, long-drawn breaths of pure wildness. This is fine and natural and full of promise. So also is the growing interest in the care and preservation of forests and wild places in general, and in the half wild parks and gardens of towns. Even the scenery habit in its most artificial forms, mixed with spectacles, silliness, and kodaks; its devotees arrayed more gorgeously than scarlet tanagers, frightening the wild game with red umbrellas, – even this is encouraging, and may well be regarded as a hopeful sign of the times.

All the Western mountains are still rich in wildness, and by means of good roads are being brought nearer civilization every year. To the sane and free it will hardly seem necessary to cross the continent in search of wild beauty, however easy the way, for they find it in abundance wherever they chance to be. Like Thoreau they see forests in orchards and patches of huckleberry brush, and oceans in ponds and drops of dew. Few in these hot, dim, strenuous times are quite sane or free; choked with care like clocks full of dust, laboriously doing so much good and making so much money, – or so little, – they are no longer good for themselves.

When, like a merchant taking a list of his goods, we take stock of our wildness, we are glad to see how much of even the most destructible kind is still unspoiled. Looking at our continent as scenery when it was all wild, lying between beautiful seas, the starry sky above it, the starry rocks beneath it, to compare its sides, the East and the West, would be like comparing the sides of a rainbow. But it is no longer equally beautiful. . . . None of Nature’s landscapes are ugly so long as they are wild; and much, we can say comfortingly, must always be in great part wild, particularly the sea and the sky, the floods of light from the stars, and the warm, unspoilable heart of the earth, infinitely beautiful, though only dimly visible to the eye of imagination. The geysers, too, spouting from the hot underworld; the steady, long-lasting glaciers on the mountains, obedient only to the sun; Yosemite domes and the tremendous grandeur of rocky cañons and mountains in general, – these must always be wild, for man can change them and mar them hardly more than can the butterflies that hover above them. But the continent’s outer beauty is fast passing away, especially the plant part of it, the most destructible and most universally charming of all.

Only thirty years ago, the great Central Valley of California, five hundred miles long and fifty miles wide, was one bed of golden and purple flowers. Now it is ploughed and pastured out of existence, gone forever, – scarce a memory of it left in fence corners and along the bluffs of the streams. The gardens of the Sierra, also, and the noble forests in both the reserved and unreserved portions are sadly hacked and trampled, notwithstanding, the ruggedness of the topography, – all excepting those of the parks guarded by a few soldiers. In the noblest forests of the world, the ground, once divinely beautiful, is desolate and repulsive, like a face ravaged by disease. This is true also of many other Pacific Coast and Rocky Mountain valleys and forests. The same fate, sooner or later, is awaiting them all, unless awakening public opinion comes forward to stop it.

The following passage is from the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), which he wrote in installments between 1771 and 1790. In this section, written late in his life, he recalls a plan for cleaning the streets that he proposed while living in London; the text of the plan itself has been omitted.

The mention of these improvements puts me in mind of one I propos'd, when in London, to Dr. Fothergill, who was among the best men I have known, and a great promoter of useful projects. I had observ'd that the streets, when dry, were never swept, and the light dust carried away; but it was suffer'd to accumulate till wet weather reduc'd it to mud, and then, after lying some days so deep on the pavement that there was no crossing but in paths kept clean by poor people with brooms, it was with great labour rak'd together and thrown up into carts open above, the sides of which suffer'd some of the slush at every jolt on the pavement to shake out and fall, sometimes to the annoyance of foot-passengers. The reason given for not sweeping the dusty streets was, that the dust would fly into the windows of shops and houses.

An accidental occurrence had instructed me how much sweeping might be done in a little time. I found at my door in Craven-street, one morning, a poor woman sweeping my pavement with a birch broom; she appeared very pale and feeble, as just come out of a fit of sickness. I ask'd who employ'd her to sweep there; she said, "Nobody, but I am very poor and in distress, and I sweeps before gentlefolkses doors, and hopes they will give me something." I bid her sweep the whole street clean, and I would give her a shilling; this was at nine o'clock; at 12 she came for the shilling. From the slowness I saw at first in her working, I could scarce believe that the work was done so soon, and sent my servant to examine it, who reported that the whole street was swept perfectly clean, and all the dust plac'd in the gutter, which was in the middle; and the next rain wash'd it quite away, so that the pavement and even the kennel were perfectly clean.

I then judg'd that, if that feeble woman could sweep such a street in three hours, a strong, active man might have done it in half the time. . . .

I have since had doubts of the practicability of the latter part of this proposal, on account of the narrowness of some streets, and the difficulty of placing the draining-sleds so as not to encumber too much the passage; but I am still of opinion that the former, requiring the dust to be swept up and carry'd away before the shops are open, is very practicable in the summer, when the days are long; for, in walking thro' the Strand and Fleet-street one morning at seven o'clock, I observ'd there was not one shop open, tho' it had been daylight and the sun up above three hours; the inhabitants of London chusing voluntarily to live much by candle-light, and sleep by sunshine, and yet often complain, a little absurdly, of the duty on candles and the high price of tallow.

Some may think these trifling matters not worth minding or relating; but when they consider that tho' dust blown into the eyes of a single person, or into a single shop on a windy day, is but of small importance, yet the great number of the instances in a populous city, and its frequent repetitions give it weight and consequence, perhaps they will not censure very severely those who bestow some attention to affairs of this seemingly low nature. Human felicity is produc'd not so much by great pieces of good fortune that seldom happen, as by little advantages that occur every day. Thus, if you teach a poor young man to shave himself, and keep his razor in order, you may contribute more to the happiness of his life than in giving him a thousand guineas. The money may be soon spent, the regret only remaining of having foolishly consumed it; but in the other case, he escapes the frequent vexation of waiting for barbers, and of their sometimes dirty fingers, offensive breaths, and dull razors; he shaves when most convenient to him, and enjoys daily the pleasure of its being done with a good instrument. With these sentiments I have hazarded the few preceding pages, hoping they may afford hints which some time or other may be useful to a city I love, having lived many years in it very happily, and perhaps to some of our towns in America.

This passage was written for this course. It imagines a lecture that a retired ship's captain gives in 1872 at the lyceum of a New England fishing town, where a storm-warning flag has recently begun to be raised whenever telegraphed weather reports show a gale approaching.

Friends and neighbors, I am told that some of you have taken to calling the new signal at the custom house "the clerk's flag," and that the name is not meant kindly. I understand the joke. A man who has read the sky over this harbor for forty years does not like to be corrected by a telegraph clerk who has never been seasick over a gunwale. I was such a man myself, and I have come tonight to tell you why I stopped laughing.

When I first went to sea, every master I sailed with carried his forecast in his knees and in his nose. A mackerel sky, a ring around the moon, gulls walking on the beach, a swell that came in ahead of its wind: these were our instruments, and I will not stand here and call them foolish. They were right more often than wrong. They were right because men had watched for generations and passed down what they saw. But notice what they could tell us. They could tell us what the weather over our own heads was about to do. They could not tell us what was already happening three hundred miles to the west.

That is the whole matter, and I ask you to hold on to it. A storm is not born over our harbor. It travels to us, as a train travels, and it keeps something like a timetable. In the old days we learned of a gale when it arrived, which is to say when it was too late to learn anything. Now an observer at a station far inland sees his barometer falling and his wind backing, and he sends word along the wire faster than any wind can blow. The telegraph does not make the weather. It simply lets the news of the weather outrun the weather itself.

I know the objections, because I have made them all. The flag has gone up on fair days, and boats have stayed at their moorings while the sun shone and the fish ran. That is true, and it costs money, and I do not pretend otherwise. The men who send these warnings are learning their trade as surely as any boy on his first voyage, and they will be wrong again. But I ask you to weigh the two kinds of error honestly. If the flag goes up and no storm comes, we lose a day. If the storm comes and no flag went up, or we would not look at it, we lose men. These are not mistakes of the same size, and no fisherman's arithmetic can make them so.

Some of you remember the Abigail Hart. She cleared this harbor eleven years ago on a morning as soft as milk. Her master was the best weather-reader I ever knew, and he read that morning correctly: it was a fine morning. What he could not read was the gale already tearing across the lakes, which reached us the next night and found her on the shoals with six men aboard. I do not say a flag would have saved them. I say only that he was never given the chance to choose.

So I do not ask you to throw away your knees and your noses. Keep them. Keep watching the gulls. A good seaman uses every instrument he has, and the old signs will still warn you of the squall that builds in an afternoon, which no wire will ever see coming. What I ask is that you add one instrument to the rest, and that you give it the same respect you would give a sounding line: not blind faith, but honest attention.

The clerk who raises that flag has never hauled a net. Very well. Neither has the keeper of the lighthouse, and I never heard any of you curse his lamp.

The following passage is from the introduction to A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, a book by the English writer Mary Wollstonecraft published in 1792.

After considering the historic page, and viewing the living world with anxious solicitude, the most melancholy emotions of sorrowful indignation have depressed my spirits, and I have sighed when obliged to confess, that either nature has made a great difference between man and man, or that the civilization, which has hitherto taken place in the world, has been very partial. I have turned over various books written on the subject of education, and patiently observed the conduct of parents and the management of schools; but what has been the result? a profound conviction, that the neglected education of my fellow creatures is the grand source of the misery I deplore; and that women in particular, are rendered weak and wretched by a variety of concurring causes, originating from one hasty conclusion. The conduct and manners of women, in fact, evidently prove, that their minds are not in a healthy state; for, like the flowers that are planted in too rich a soil, strength and usefulness are sacrificed to beauty; and the flaunting leaves, after having pleased a fastidious eye, fade, disregarded on the stalk, long before the season when they ought to have arrived at maturity. One cause of this barren blooming I attribute to a false system of education, gathered from the books written on this subject by men, who, considering females rather as women than human creatures, have been more anxious to make them alluring mistresses than rational wives; and the understanding of the sex has been so bubbled by this specious homage, that the civilized women of the present century, with a few exceptions, are only anxious to inspire love, when they ought to cherish a nobler ambition, and by their abilities and virtues exact respect.

. . . Yet, because I am a woman, I would not lead my readers to suppose, that I mean violently to agitate the contested question respecting the equality and inferiority of the sex; but as the subject lies in my way, and I cannot pass it over without subjecting the main tendency of my reasoning to misconstruction, I shall stop a moment to deliver, in a few words, my opinion. In the government of the physical world, it is observable that the female, in general, is inferior to the male. The male pursues, the female yields – this is the law of nature; and it does not appear to be suspended or abrogated in favour of woman. This physical superiority cannot be denied – and it is a noble prerogative! But not content with this natural pre-eminence, men endeavour to sink us still lower, merely to render us alluring objects for a moment; and women, intoxicated by the adoration which men, under the influence of their senses, pay them, do not seek to obtain a durable interest in their hearts, or to become the friends of the fellow creatures who find amusement in their society.

. . . My own sex, I hope, will excuse me, if I treat them like rational creatures, instead of flattering their FASCINATING graces, and viewing them as if they were in a state of perpetual childhood, unable to stand alone. I earnestly wish to point out in what true dignity and human happiness consists – I wish to persuade women to endeavour to acquire strength, both of mind and body, and to convince them, that the soft phrases, susceptibility of heart, delicacy of sentiment, and refinement of taste, are almost synonymous with epithets of weakness, and that those beings who are only the objects of pity and that kind of love, which has been termed its sister, will soon become objects of contempt.

. . . This is a rough sketch of my plan; and should I express my conviction with the energetic emotions that I feel whenever I think of the subject, the dictates of experience and reflection will be felt by some of my readers. Animated by this important object, I shall disdain to cull my phrases or polish my style – I aim at being useful, and sincerity will render me unaffected; for wishing rather to persuade by the force of my arguments, than dazzle by the elegance of my language, I shall not waste my time in rounding periods, nor in fabricating the turgid bombast of artificial feelings, which, coming from the head, never reach the heart. I shall be employed about things, not words! and, anxious to render my sex more respectable members of society, I shall try to avoid that flowery diction which has slided from essays into novels, and from novels into familiar letters and conversation.

This passage was written for this course. It imagines a commencement address that a high school chess coach gives to the school's graduating class.

Graduates, families, and members of the faculty who are pretending not to check the time: thank you for letting a chess teacher have the microphone. I promise to be brief, which is a thing chess teachers say right before they are not.

For twenty-two years I have coached the chess club in a basement room that smells of floor wax and oranges. In that time I have watched roughly nine hundred students learn the game, and I can tell you the exact moment each of them became a real player. It was not the day they won their first tournament. It was the first time they lost a game, sat down across from the person who had beaten them, and asked, "Can you show me where I went wrong?"

Chess players have a name for this. We call it the post-mortem, which is a grim word for a generous act. Two people who were trying, a minute ago, to defeat each other set the pieces back up and replay the game together. The winner points out the move that cost the loser the game. The loser, often red in the face, asks questions. Nobody is keeping score anymore. The only thing left to win is understanding, and it can be shared.

You may be thinking that this is a sweet custom for a basement room and has nothing to do with the world you are about to enter. I thought so too, once. But consider how the rest of life handles a loss. We hide it. We rename it. We say the test was unfair, the referee was blind, the job was not one we wanted anyway. Some of that is self-protection, and some self-protection is healthy; I am not asking you to confess every failure to everyone you meet. I am asking you to notice how rarely we do the one thing a chess player does without thinking: return to the board and look.

Here is what the board teaches, if you let it. A lost game is not a verdict on your intelligence. It is a record, move by move, of decisions you made, and every record can be read. The student who reads it improves. The student who refuses to read it plays the same losing game for years, with different openings, and wonders why the result never changes.

I have one more thing to tell you, and it is the hardest. The surest way to improve at chess is to play people who are better than you. That means losing, often, and on purpose. The strongest players I have coached were not the ones who won the most in their first year. They were the ones who kept walking up to the older students and asking for a game they knew they would lose. They traded a winning record for a better mind, and it was the best bargain any of them ever made.

You are about to have many chances to stay at a table where you always win. Some of those tables will be comfortable, and some will pay well. I hope you will sometimes get up from them.

Find the people who can beat you. Play them. Lose. And then, when the clock has stopped and the room has gone quiet, do the bravest thing a person can do after a defeat: set the pieces back up, and ask to be shown.

The following passage is from an essay by the English writer Samuel Johnson published on March 23, 1751, in The Rambler, a periodical made up of his short essays.

An assurance of unfading laurels, and immortal reputation, is the settled reciprocation of civility between amicable writers. To raise monuments more durable than brass, and more conspicuous than pyramids, has been long the common boast of literature; but, among the innumerable architects that erect columns to themselves, far the greater part, either for want of durable materials, or of art to dispose them, see their edifices perish as they are towering to completion, and those few that for a while attract the eye of mankind, are generally weak in the foundation, and soon sink by the saps of time.

No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes, than a publick library; for who can see the wall crowded on every side by mighty volumes, the works of laborious meditation, and accurate inquiry, now scarcely known but by the catalogue, and preserved only to increase the pomp of learning, without considering how many hours have been wasted in vain endeavours, how often imagination has anticipated the praises of futurity, how many statues have risen to the eye of vanity, how many ideal converts have elevated zeal, how often wit has exulted in the eternal infamy of his antagonists, and dogmatism has delighted in the gradual advances of his authority, the immutability of his decrees, and the perpetuity of his power?

. . . Of the innumerable authors whose performances are thus treasured up in magnificent obscurity, most are forgotten, because they never deserved to be remembered, and owed the honours which they once obtained, not to judgment or to genius, to labour or to art, but to the prejudice of faction, the stratagem of intrigue, or the servility of adulation.

. . . It cannot, however, be denied, that many have sunk into oblivion, whom it were unjust to number with this despicable class. Various kinds of literary fame seem destined to various measures of duration. Some spread into exuberance with a very speedy growth, but soon wither and decay; some rise more slowly, but last long. Parnassus has its flowers of transient fragrance, as well as its oaks of towering height, and its laurels of eternal verdure.

Among those whose reputation is exhausted in a short time by its own luxuriance, are the writers who take advantage of present incidents or characters which strongly interest the passions, and engage universal attention. It is not difficult to obtain readers, when we discuss a question which every one is desirous to understand, which is debated in every assembly, and has divided the nation into parties; or when we display the faults or virtues of him whose publick conduct has made almost every man his enemy or his friend. To the quick circulation of such productions all the motives of interest and vanity concur; the disputant enlarges his knowledge, the zealot animates his passion, and every man is desirous to inform himself concerning affairs so vehemently agitated and variously represented.

. . . The authors of new discoveries may surely expect to be reckoned among those whose writings are secure of veneration: yet it often happens that the general reception of a doctrine obscures the books in which it was delivered. When any tenet is generally received and adopted as an incontrovertible principle, we seldom look back to the arguments upon which it was first established, or can bear that tediousness of deduction, and multiplicity of evidence, by which its author was forced to reconcile it to prejudice, and fortify it in the weakness of novelty against obstinacy and envy.

It is well known how much of our philosophy is derived from Boyle's discovery of the qualities of the air; yet of those who now adopt or enlarge his theory, very few have read the detail of his experiments. His name is, indeed, reverenced; but his works are neglected; we are contented to know, that he conquered his opponents, without inquiring what cavils were produced against him, or by what proofs they were confuted.

. . . There are, indeed, few kinds of composition from which an author, however learned or ingenious, can hope a long continuance of fame. He who has carefully studied human nature, and can well describe it, may with most reason flatter his ambition. Bacon, among all his pretensions to the regard of posterity, seems to have pleased himself chiefly with his Essays, which come home to men's business and bosoms, and of which, therefore, he declares his expectation, that they will live as long as books last. It may, however, satisfy an honest and benevolent mind to have been useful, though less conspicuous; nor will he that extends his hope to higher rewards, be so much anxious to obtain praise, as to discharge the duty which Providence assigns him.

This passage was written for this course. It imagines an opinion column in a city newspaper, published while the city's library board considers plans to renovate the main public library.

The plans for the renovated Central Library went on display last week, and they are, for the most part, wonderful. There will be a workshop with sewing machines and a laser cutter. There will be a recording studio, a children's wing with a climbing wall, and a café whose espresso machine, I am told, was chosen by committee. The architects call the new building "a living room for the city." I have no quarrel with the phrase. My quarrel is with what the plans leave out.

On the third floor of the old building, behind two sets of doors, is the Reading Room. It has forty oak tables, green-shaded lamps, and a rule older than anyone who works there: no talking. Under the new plan, the room becomes "flexible collaborative space." The tables will be replaced by movable pods. The doors will come off.

I understand why. Libraries are fighting for their lives, and a library that hushes its patrons can seem like a relic, a place that serves the few who already love it. The new library will welcome teenagers who would never have climbed to the third floor, and new arrivals practicing English aloud, and toddlers who are, by temperament, opposed to silence. All of that is good. A library that stays quiet by staying empty has not preserved anything worth keeping.

But noise is not a neutral ingredient that we can add to a building without taking something away. Consider who uses the Reading Room on a weekday morning. I went last Tuesday and counted. There was a man studying for a nursing exam, a woman working through a stack of benefit forms, two college students, a retiree reading a fat history of the Erie Canal, and a teenager who, the librarian told me, comes every day because his apartment holds six people and one table. None of them were there for the books, exactly. They were there for the quiet, which most of them could not find anywhere else.

We talk about access to information as though it were the only kind of access a library provides. It is not. Silence, too, is unevenly distributed. People with money buy it all the time: they buy it in large houses, in private offices, in noise-canceling headphones, in cabins at the end of long roads. People without money mostly go without. For them, the Reading Room is not a quaint tradition. It is the one room in their lives where the world agrees, by rule, to leave them alone.

The fix is not hard, and it does not require undoing the architects' good work. Keep one room. It need not be the grandest room or the largest. Put doors on it, put a sign on the doors, and let the rest of the building be as loud and alive as the city it serves. A living room is a fine thing for a city to have. So is a place to think.

The library board votes on the final plans next month. Its members should remember that a library's oldest promise was never to entertain us, or even to inform us. It was to give us somewhere to sit down and attend to something harder than our surroundings. That promise can share a building with a climbing wall. It cannot survive a building with no doors.

The following is a draft of a letter a student is writing to the Millbrook City Council about the hours of a branch library. It may need revision.

Dear Members of the Millbrook City Council:

(1) My name is Dana Reyes, and I am a junior at Millbrook High School who has used the Eastside Branch Library since I was six years old. (2) Last spring, as part of the budget cuts, the council voted to close the branch on Sundays. (3) I am writing to you about the library and its hours.

(4) For many students on the east side, the branch is the only quiet place to study. (5) Our apartments are small, and many of us share bedrooms with younger brothers and sisters. (6) The main library downtown is still open on Sundays, but from Eastside it is a forty-minute bus ride each way.

(7) Sunday is also the one day many working parents can bring their children to the library. (8) At the branch's last Sunday story hour, in March, the children's room held thirty-one families, more than at any weekday program that month. (9) Since the closing, story hour has moved to Tuesday mornings, when most of those parents are at work.

(10) I understand that the city's budget is tight. (11) According to the council's own budget report, Sunday hours at Eastside cost about 18,000 dollars a year, which is way less than the ridiculous amount the city wasted on new flower planters for Main Street. (12) The Friends of Eastside Library have offered to pay for one Sunday staff member for the first year. (13) Restoring the hours would require only three things, one librarian, heat and lights for the building, and a part-time security guard.

(14) The council will vote on next year's budget at its meeting on June 9. (15) Thank you for reading my letter.

Sincerely, Dana Reyes

The following is a draft of a speech a student is preparing to give during the public comment period of a school board meeting, where the board is considering next year's budget. It may need revision.

(1) Good evening, members of the board. (2) My name is Marcus Lee, and I am a senior who plays cello in the Harlow High School orchestra. (3) Music is something that many people enjoy in many different ways.

(4) The budget you are considering tonight would end the fifth-grade strings program at all four of Harlow's elementary schools, saving the district about 40,000 dollars a year. (5) I started cello in that program when I was ten, and so did lots of other people in our orchestra. (6) Without the program, students would never pick up an instrument until high school, and by then it is very hard to catch up.

(7) The program also teaches habits that carry over into every other class. (8) A fifth grader learning the cello plays the same eight measures thirty times, slowly, until every note is right. (9) That kind of patience is useful for a lot of stuff.

(10) Some board members have suggested that students could simply join the band in sixth grade instead. (11) A student who wants to play violin, viola, cello, or bass would have no place to start. (12) The band is a fine program, but it has no string instruments.

(13) Ending the program would save the district 40,000 dollars a year. (14) It would cost the district the first lessons of every string player who might come after us. (15) I ask you to keep the fifth-grade strings program in next year's budget. (16) Thank you for listening, and I hope to see all of you at our spring concert in April.

The following is a draft of an article a student is writing for the Cedar Hill Neighborhood Association's monthly newsletter, which is delivered to every household in the neighborhood. It may need revision.

(1) Every Thursday morning, the blue bins come out on Cedar Hill's sidewalks, and most of us assume that whatever goes into them will become something new. (2) A rejected load goes to the landfill, recyclables and all. (3) According to the county's recycling office, about one truckload in five from our neighborhood is now rejected at the sorting center because it holds too much material that cannot be recycled.

(4) The biggest problem is plastic grocery bags. (5) Pat Ruiz, who manages the county sorting center, says that bags wrap around the spinning screens that separate paper from cans. (6) When that happens, workers must shut down the line and cut the bags free by hand. (7) Honestly, anyone who still puts bags in the bin should know better by now.

(8) Food is the second problem. (9) Paper soaked with grease cannot be made into new paper, and it can spoil the clean paper packed around it in the truck. (10) Ruiz showed me a bale of newspaper that had been ruined by a single leaking jar of salsa.

(11) Every container should be scrubbed spotless before it goes in the bin. (12) Rinsing a jar takes only a few seconds. (13) It can keep a whole truckload out of the landfill.

(14) Bags can go to the collection box at the front of Hill Street Market which sends them to a company that turns them into park benches. (15) For anything else, the county's website has a search box: type in an item, and it tells you which bin it belongs in.

The following is a draft of a grant application that a high school history club is writing to the Ellery County Community Foundation, which funds local projects. It may need revision.

(1) The Ashford High School History Club requests 3,500 dollars from the Ellery County Community Foundation to record interviews with former workers of the Ashford Woolen Mill, which closed in 1979. (2) For ninety years, the mill employed nearly a third of the town. (3) This project is interesting and important.

(4) The mill's payroll books and photographs are stored at the Ashford Public Library. (5) These records cannot show what the work was like: the noise of the looms, the friendships on the night shift, or what the closing meant to families. (6) Last spring, two club members spoke with Ruth Dawes, who ran a loom at the mill from 1951 until its last day. (7) She described the whistle that sounded at 6:40 every morning, so loud that the whole town woke to it. (8) Of the roughly 140 former workers on the Ashford Historical Society's list, most are now over seventy-five. (9) Sadly, they're getting really old and won't be around forever.

(10) Over the summer, twelve club members will interview thirty former workers in their homes or at the senior center. (11) Each interview will last about an hour and will be recorded. (12) Students are the best people to do these interviews. (13) Volunteers from the historical society will train club members in interviewing during May. (14) The recordings and typed transcripts will then go to the public library, where anyone can hear or read them.

(15) The grant would pay for two audio recorders (900 dollars), a transcription service (2,000 dollars), and a public listening night at the library in September (600 dollars). (16) We hope you like our idea.

The following is a draft of a review a student is writing for the community page of the Riverton Herald, a local newspaper, about a new city bus line. It may need revision.

(1) For years, getting from Riverton's north side to Riverton Community College on the south side meant riding downtown and changing buses, a trip that could take more than an hour. (2) In August, the transit authority opened Route 22, a crosstown line that runs directly between the two. (3) I rode it every day for the first two weeks of the semester, and I have some thoughts about it.

(4) The best thing about Route 22 is it's speed. (5) My morning trip from Elm Street to the college now takes twenty-six minutes, compared with fifty-five on the old two-bus route. (6) The new buses are also comfortable. (7) On three mornings, I missed a bus because the arrival time on the app was wrong.

(8) The schedule is another story. (9) On weekdays, a bus comes every twelve minutes from six in the morning until eleven at night. (10) On Saturdays and Sundays, buses come only every thirty-five minutes, and the last one leaves the college at 7:15 p.m. (11) Students who work weekend shifts at the stores near campus often finish later than that, and they're basically stuck, which is totally lame.

(12) Riders can track every bus in real time on the city's free TransitNow app. (13) Unfortunately, the app often shows a bus arriving in two minutes when it is really ten minutes away. (14) The transit authority says that an update to the app is coming this winter.

(15) Overall, that's my review of Route 22.

The following is a draft of a personal essay a student is writing for a regional magazine's series on home kitchens. Most of the magazine's readers are home cooks who have never worked in a restaurant. It may need revision.

(1) In my grandmother's kitchen, Thursday was soup night. (2) Whatever was left in the refrigerator went into one big pot: half an onion, two carrots going soft, the end of a roast chicken. (3) That was the real difference between her kitchen and the café, since she planned for leftovers before she bought a single carrot. (4) As a child, I thought Thursday soup was simply an old habit, like the rubber bands she kept looped around a doorknob.

(5) I understood it only after I started working at the Corner Table Café last summer. (6) At closing time each day, the café threw away whatever had not sold. (7) On my first Friday I carried four trays of muffins, a pan of lasagna, and two bowls of cut fruit out to the dumpster. (8) The walk-in was full of food that nobody had planned to use.

(9) The owner was not careless. (10) She ordered each week as if every muffin would sell. (11) Leftovers were, to her, a mistake. (12) To my grandmother, they were an ingredient.

(13) Anyone can cut their food waste in half just by making soup once a week. (14) This fall, after my job ended, I talked my family into trying it. (15) The first Thursday, we made soup from leftover rice, half a can of beans, and a bag of spinach that was going limp. (16) It was pretty good.

(17) Thursday soup is the bomb, and everyone should totally try it.

The following is a draft of a post a volunteer is writing for the blog of a county history museum, introducing a new exhibit about a school for deaf children that once stood in the county. It may need revision.

(1) This post is about a new exhibit at our museum. (2) From 1889 to 1971, the Linwood School for the Deaf taught children from across Merritt County to read, to write, and to sign. (3) The old school building on Orchard Road now holds apartments, but this spring the school's story returns in our second-floor gallery.

(4) The heart of the exhibit is a small leather notebook. (5) Clara Haines who taught at Linwood from 1902 to 1938 filled it with pencil sketches of more than 400 signs. (6) Many of the signs were invented by her students for things in their daily lives, such as the bell that called them to meals, and some appear in no other record. (7) The school building was being cleared for repairs in 2019. (8) A worker found the notebook in a box in the attic.

(9) After 1910, Linwood followed the oralist method, and manualism was banned until 1946. (10) Students did not give up their language. (11) Each fall, older students quietly taught the signs to the new arrivals. (12) However, many of the signs in Haines's notebook are still used by deaf adults in the county today.

(13) Visitors can watch short videos in which three former students sign stories about their school days, from a first homesick night to graduation, with English captions. (14) The exhibit runs from March 8 through August 30. (15) Several of the signs in these videos match sketches in Haines's notebook. (16) Admission is free on the first Sunday of every month, and the gallery is open to visitors of all ages.

The following is a draft of a summary a student is writing for her high school's nature club, reporting on the club's first season in a citizen science project that counts birds at backyard feeders. It may need revision.

(1) This fall, twelve members of the Marlow High Nature Club took part in the Hollins Valley Feeder Count, a project in which volunteers count the birds at backyard feeders and send their results to the Hollins Valley Nature Center. (2) Scientists at the center combine reports from hundreds of volunteers to track how the valley's bird populations change from year to year. (3) Counts like these matter because no small team of scientists could watch thousands of feeders on its own. (4) This summary reports what our club counted and what we plan to do next season.

(5) Between October 1 and December 15, club members made 96 counts at nine feeders, all stocked with the same black sunflower seed. (6) We recorded 22 species and 3,140 individual birds. (7) The most common bird was the dark-eyed junco, it made up nearly a third of all the birds we counted. (8) We also spotted a red-breasted nuthatch at the Garcia family's feeder, the first one reported in our part of the valley in four years.

(9) Where a feeder was placed seemed to matter. (10) The four feeders within ten feet of trees or shrubs averaged 41 birds per count, while the five in open lawns averaged 25. (11) This proves that every bird in the valley prefers feeders near trees.

(12) Next season, the club hopes to double the number of feeders it watches. (13) Mr. Okoye, the club's adviser, has offered to lend feeders to members who do not have one. (14) The nature center thanked us for our reports and said the nuthatch sighting had been added to its records. (15) Anyone interested in joining should come to the club's first meeting on September 9 in Room 114.

The following is a draft of an article a student is writing for her high school's website about a change to the school's annual science fair. It may need revision.

(1) For as long as anyone at Dalton High School can remember, the spring science fair has looked the same; rows of folding tables, three-panel posters, and students standing quietly beside them while judges read. (2) This year, the science department tried something different. (3) Every project had to include a live demonstration, and judges spent at least ten minutes asking each student questions. (4) The new format was different from the old one in a number of ways.

(5) The demonstrations drew a much larger crowd. (6) About 300 visitors attended, compared with roughly 120 last year, according to the sign-in sheets at the door. (7) Families stood around at tables where something was happening: a sophomore's homemade water filter turning muddy water clear, a junior's model bridge holding up a stack of textbooks.

(8) The questioning also showed what students actually understood. (9) "I had to really know it," she said. (10) Senior Priya Nandakumar, whose project tested how salt changes the temperature at which water freezes, said the judges' questions made her explain steps she had only memorized before. (11) In a survey after the fair, eleven of the fourteen judges said they learned more about each student's thinking than in past years.

(12) Several students said the ten-minute interviews made them nervous, and two dropped out the week before the fair. (13) Similarly, the department plans to hold practice interviews during the month before next year's fair. (14) Teachers will play the judges, so students can rehearse their explanations without being graded.

(15) In conclusion, science is cool.

The following is a draft of a proposal a student is writing to her high school principal, asking that volunteer work at a local community theater count toward the school's service requirement. It may need revision.

(1) I am a junior at Kenwood High School, and I am writing to propose a change to the school's community service guidelines. (2) Every Kenwood student must complete forty hours of service before graduation, and the guidelines count work at food banks, animal shelters, hospitals, and city parks. (3) Hours spent volunteering at the Elmwood Community Theater do not count, because the guidelines describe theater as a hobby rather than a service. (4) That rule is unfair and, frankly, kind of ridiculous. (5) I think volunteering at the theater is a good thing.

(6) The Elmwood Community Theater is not a club for its own members. (7) It is a nonprofit that stages five plays a year and offers free matinees for the county's elementary schools and for residents of its two senior centers. (8) Last season, more than 2,000 children and older adults saw a play there without paying.

(9) Volunteers also do work that the theater could not run without. (10) They build and paint sets, sew costumes, run the lights and sound, and sell tickets and usher at every performance. (11) During the week before a show opens, some volunteers hang around until eleven at night to finish the set.

(12) Some teachers may worry that students would count hours spent rehearsing their own roles. (13) My proposal would count only backstage and front-of-house work. (14) A theater staff member would sign each student's log after every shift, just as supervisors do at the food bank and the animal shelter.

(15) Thanks.