Revising with Williams

In finding a selection from the EMU Course Catalog, I was especially looking for something that would apply to my favorite quote from Williams in the first chapter:

"Some of us feel compelled to use pretentious language to make ideas that we think are too simple seem more impressive." <---- That is SO true. I even would admit to being guilty of it, and I suspect there are many others who would confess to the same crime.

Here is the text I took from the website:

The EMU Children’s Institute serves as the practicum placement site for students preparing to be early childhood education teachers. Practicum students are closely supervised by professional classroom teachers and University faculty members.

Flights of Imagination, the summer day camp program at the Children’s Institute, offers exciting and varied programs for children entering kindergarten and first grade, supervised by professional teaching staff, with EMU students as camp counselors. Camp is offered as eight weekly sessions.

Activities at the Children’s Institute are play based and developmentally appropriate, and designed to meet the needs of each child in the group. Teaching staff have completed coursework and hold degrees/advanced professional degrees in early childhood education. Staff training and in-service days are conducted throughout the year.

And here is my revised version:

The EMU Children’s Institute serves as the placement site for students preparing to be early childhood education teachers. These practicum students are closely supervised by professional classroom teachers and University faculty members.


Activities at the Children’s Institute are play-based and developmentally appropriate. They are designed to meet the needs of each child in the group. Additionally, teaching staff members have completed coursework and either hold degrees or advanced professional degrees in early childhood education. Staff training and in-service days are conducted throughout the year.

Flights of Imagination, the summer day camp program at the Children’s Institute, offers exciting and varied programs for children entering kindergarten and first grade. Camp is offered as eight weekly sessions, and is supervised by a professional teaching staff, with EMU students serving as counselors.




Though I didn't find a whole lot style-wise wrong with this excerpt, I did find the sentence in the middle paragraph to be extenseively long and therefore unclear. (p.24-25) By shortening the sentences, it provides more information with less misunderstanding. In the first paragraph, I found "practicum" to be redundant and therefore changed it and I think it sounds more fluid when using the word only once.

Last, I particularily liked Williams on p.25, saying "You may have been told to write short sentences". While he goes further to say that long sentences are not bad as long as character matches actions, he hits the nail on the head with "The objective is not curtness: what counts is not the number of words in a sentence, but how eaily we get from beginning end while understanding everything in between." I feel like the long sentences in the EMU excerpt were just too wordy in places and by redirecting some of the wording and focus, everything became more clear and therefore made way more sense.

Since the third chapter focused on cohesion, I found it necessary to switch the second and third paragraphs, because the second paragraph focused on activites, of which Flights of Imagination can be qualified as.