5.4 The Student Draft Composition: Revision & Editing Questions

5.4 The Student Draft Composition: Revision and Editing Questions

Quick Summary: One set of questions on every Part B examination is unlike all the others. Alberta Education and Childcare states it plainly: "One set of questions is based on a draft composition written by a hypothetical student. The passage that precedes the student's composition inspires the student's writing topic. The questions require the English Language Arts 30-2 student to make decisions about revisions and corrections to the draft relative to topic, purpose, audience, and presentation." You are not reading this passage to admire it. You are reading it to fix it — and the bulletin lists specific knowledge related to the process of editing and revision among the skills Part B assesses.

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How the Set Is Built

The draft set arrives as a pair. First comes a reading selection — an article, an essay, a poem, a short narrative. Then comes a student's draft composition, written in response to that selection. The hypothetical student has read what you have just read, formed an opinion, and produced a first draft with all the flaws first drafts have.

+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|                 Anatomy of the Draft Composition Question Set               |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| PART 1: The Source Passage                                                  |
|   - A short text that inspires the student writer's topic                   |
|   - You answer ordinary comprehension questions on it first                 |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| PART 2: The Hypothetical Student's Draft                                    |
|   - Numbered sentences and/or numbered paragraphs                           |
|   - Deliberate weaknesses: unclear focus, weak transitions, wrong register, |
|     wandering sentence, agreement and punctuation errors                    |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| PART 3: The Revision and Editing Items                                      |
|   - Decisions about topic, purpose, audience, and presentation              |
|   - Each option is a possible change; only one improves the draft on the    |
|     terms the writer has set                                                |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+

The draft is numbered for a reason: the questions will cite sentence or paragraph numbers, and your answer has to be locatable. Treat those numbers the way you treat line references elsewhere on Part B — as an instruction to look at a precise place, then at the three lines on either side of it.

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Revision and Editing Are Two Different Jobs

Confusing these two is the most common way students lose marks in this set.

A revision question can have a grammatically perfect option that is still wrong, because the option damages focus or misjudges the audience. An editing question can have an appealing option that is stylistically nicer but introduces a new error. Decide which job the stem is asking for before you compare options.

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The Four Decision Frames

The bulletin names the four criteria against which you make decisions: topic, purpose, audience, and presentation. Every item in the set is a question about one of them.

1. Topic — Does It Belong?

The classic item asks which sentence should be removed, or which detail is irrelevant. The test is not whether the sentence is interesting or true; it is whether it develops the draft's stated topic.

• Draft topic: the writer argues that volunteering taught her patience.
• Candidate sentence: "My brother volunteers at the same shelter and he is studying to be a veterinarian."
• Verdict: Delete. True, pleasant, and about somebody else's future rather than the writer's patience.

2. Purpose — Does It Advance the Argument?

Purpose questions target transitions, topic sentences, and paragraph order. Ask what job the paragraph is doing, then choose the option that makes the job visible.

• If paragraph 3 concedes an opposing view and paragraph 4 refutes it, the credited transition signals contrast — However, Even so — not addition (Also, In addition).
• If the draft moves from a general claim to a specific anecdote, the credited topic sentence narrows; it does not restate the introduction.

3. Audience — Who Is Being Spoken To?

Register questions are answered from evidence in the draft itself. If the hypothetical student is writing a letter to a principal, slang and exclamation marks are wrong even though they are "expressive." If the draft is a personal reflection for classmates, stiff academic diction is equally wrong.

[!TIP] Read the draft's opening two sentences to fix the register, then judge every option against that established voice. The credited answer almost never asks the writer to switch voices mid-draft; it asks them to be consistent with the voice they chose.

4. Presentation — Is It Clear, Ordered, and Correct?

This frame covers paragraphing, sentence combining, wordiness, and the mechanics you would expect: agreement, pronoun reference, tense, punctuation, commonly confused words.

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Worked Example

Read this short draft, written by a hypothetical student in response to an article about a town closing its public pool.

(1) I think closing the Millcreek pool is a mistake. (2) The town says it costs
too much money to keep open. (3) But the pool is where I learned to swim, and
its where most kids in town learn too. (4) My cousin lives in Red Deer and she
says their pool is really nice and new. (5) Without the pool, families would
have to drive forty minutes to Brooks, which many families cannot afford to do
every week. (6) Also the swim club would have nowhere to practice, they would
probably fold. (7) So I think council should keep it open.

Item A (Topic). Which sentence should be deleted to improve the unity of the paragraph? Sentence 4. The cousin's town has a nice pool; that fact neither supports nor opposes closing Millcreek's. Sentence 2 states the opposing argument and belongs; sentences 5 and 6 give consequences and belong.

Item B (Editing). What correction should be made to sentence 3? Change its to it's. The sentence needs the contraction of it is, not the possessive. Note how the error survives any spell-check: its is a real word.

Item C (Presentation). What is the best revision of sentence 6? Sentence 6 is a comma splice ("...nowhere to practice, they would probably fold"). The best revision joins the clauses properly — Also, the swim club would have nowhere to practise, so it would probably fold — rather than merely deleting the second clause, which would throw away a real consequence.

Item D (Purpose). Which revision would most improve the concluding sentence? Sentence 7 restates the opening with no added force. A stronger conclusion names the decision asked for and the reason: Council should keep the pool open so that Millcreek children can keep learning to swim in their own town.

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Decision Rules That Keep You Out of Trouble

1. Serve the writer's purpose, not your own. You are improving someone else's draft on their terms. If the hypothetical student is arguing against the closure, an option that softens the argument into neutrality is wrong even if it sounds fair-minded.
2. Prefer the option that fixes the named problem and nothing else. Options that rewrite three sentences to solve a comma problem are over-corrections.
3. Do not add information. You cannot verify facts the draft does not contain; an option that supplies a statistic or a source out of nowhere is the Plausible Outside Knowledge trap wearing a revision costume.
4. Concise and correct beats elegant and wrong. If two options are both grammatical, choose the one that is clearer and shorter; wordiness is itself a presentation flaw.
5. Check the replacement in place. Read the credited option back into the draft the way you would substitute a vocabulary word into its sentence. If the paragraph now stumbles, it is not the answer.
6. Answer in order. These items track through the draft from beginning to end, exactly as other Part B sets track through a reading; jumping around makes it easy to apply an earlier fix to a later sentence.

[!IMPORTANT] There is a bonus to this set that most students miss: it is a free rehearsal of the very skills that Matters of Correctness and Writing Skills pay for on Part A. The comma splices, pronoun slips, and weak transitions you are asked to diagnose here are the same ones markers find in Part A papers. Diagnose them well enough in someone else's draft and you will start seeing them in your own.