Demo Edit 8 (Optional)

In this next module I’m going to walk you through my editing of a student’s essay from a previous course. I want you to now pause the video take a minute, read through the essay at least once or twice. I’ve provided a text file if you’d rather read it there and if you’d like to try to edit it on your own, and then restart the video and I’ll walk you through it. So this essay is actually an introduction section, introduction of a scientific manuscript. It’s a great topic. I couldn’t resist using this for the demo edit since it’s on wine and grapes, it’s of interest to lots of people. I learned something new. I had no idea that the crowdedness, the compactness of the grapes has something to do with their quality. So it’s very interesting. The essay in general is very clear. I’m able to say exactly what the main point of the study is, which is what you should be doing in an introduction section. In general, the organization is good and the author here has stuck to the three or four paragraph rule for introduction, so that’s all great. The one thing I’ll point out, the one area where I think the other could do a little work is that you’ll notice that the paragraphs are pretty packed. They’re pretty big and it’s pretty intimidating for a reader to see essays, to see paragraphs that are this long. There’s not a lot of whitespace. It’s a lot to read through. So what I’m going to suggest to this author is to try to trim these paragraphs and get them to be a little bit shorter and a little bit more manageable, and that’s what we’re going to do with this edit. So starting with the first sentence, bunch compactness is a major factor affecting the quality of wine and table grapes. Now when I first read this introduction section, I didn’t get right off the bat that being more compact is a bad thing. I think that’s what I’m inferring here is that in general more compactness, be more compact is bad. This sentence also is the first sentence of your introduction and has a to be verb is. I thought maybe we could have a more exciting verb there. So I wonder if it’s okay to say bunch compactness. How about lowers the quality of wine to table grapes? No, I’d have to check with the author that that’s always the case. Maybe at some point if it becomes too sparse that’s bad too. But I think in general what I’m getting out of this induction section is that more compact lowers the quality, so let’s just say that right from the beginning so there’s no confusion. Now, the paragraph now is divided into two parts. We get a bunch of information about why the compactness lowers the quality and there’s kind of two reasons. One reason that the author starts with here, is that compact bunches tend to attract more pests and mold for various reasons that the author goes into. And then, we get some kind of, a little bit more direct reasons why the bunch quality is affected by compactness because the inner grapes don’t get as much sunlight, and therefore may not have as much quality and plus there’s more pressure and they may burst. So actually, I’m going to rearrange the order of those two things because the berries themselves not receiving enough sunlight are bursting inside, seems to be the more direct route of reduced quality, and then the pest are a second mechanism. I just think it logically fall slightly better this way so I’m just going to shift that. So I’m going to start with compact bunches and the idea here is that the number of interior berries increases as your compactness increases. So I think we’ll start with that idea. It also helps the reader to picture exactly what’s going on with compact bunches so let’s start right there. Compact bunches have a high number and the way it defines compactness for the reader. Compact bunches have a high number of interior berries, and then I’m going to put a semi-colon here and then get in the ideas of why that might be bad. So these berries, may not receive the sun irradiation needed to achieve an adequate phenolic maturity, leading to a heterogeneous rightness of the bunch. How about if we just said, these berries may feel to ripen due to insufficient sunlight? I think that captures the idea, may fail to ripen due to insufficient sunlight, it’s just a little bit more streamlined. And then there’s another thing that we get elsewhere in this first paragraph that the author tells us is that these berries actually might burst due to the pressure inside, and I think that would also reduce quality. So these berries may fail to ripen due to insufficient sunlight and they burst due to the pressure caused by crowding. I kind of like the word crowding, it gets across this idea of being really crowded inside. So here’s all the reasons that it’s bad to be a berry on the inside, when there’s a lot of crowding, a lot of compactness. So that gets across the sort of direct effects on the grape quality and then we have this other idea which is that pest and mold also like that environment. So now I’m going to put that in. So additionally, pests and diseases. I change diseases to molds again. I’d have to check with the author that I’m being accurate here, but I think that the diseases that are not sort of pests, like bugs that the author is giving examples of, I think those are molds again. We do want to verify the accuracy of that, here’s a great place to set off some examples with nice dashes. So how about we just put all of those examples in some dashes. Additionally, pests and molds such as da da da, the reader doesn’t mind if you stick in all these examples or the dashes like that. These pests and molds, well what do they do? They grow more easily in compact bunches. So, let’s just say that really simply. So they like that environment. And then the author gives a whole bunch of reasons why pests and molds might like the compact bunches better. I think we can get this all into one sentence. This study isn’t actually about measuring, how we measure bunch compactness. It’s not about the pest and molds that grow there. So I don’t think we need to give all the reasons why they might prefer to grow there. We just need to give the reader a taste of why it is they might like that environment. So I might shorten things a little bit, trim things a little bit here, and put it all in one sentence. Also this sentence about reducing crop yield in wine quality and dropping economic profits, I think we can infer that if pests and molds are growing there, that all those things will happen and that the reader doesn’t need to be explicitly told that. So why might these organisms like this environment? I’m going to say these organisms, right here, these organisms prefer an environment. The idea is that they’d like a low oxygen, low sun environment, prefer an environment with low air circulation and sun exposure might change the poor to low because I think it’s better to say that sun exposure is low rather than sun exposure is poor. Prefer an environment with low air circulation and sun exposure. One note I should make is that, in the original submission of this introduction section, the author had some very long references with all the names and the dates written out. I found that there was a little bit hard to do my edit with all of those references there. So I just changed those to some random numbers just to let you know there were references there this was a very well cited introduction section. But the authors should notice that I changed those to just some numbers to make this a little easier to edit. So, and I apologize if I messed up the references. These organisms prefer an environment with low air circulation and sun exposure and then we get that there’s something about the wax that might make this more favorable for these organisms. I guess, I don’t think this is a piece about those organisms. I actually don’t think we need to have every possible reason there, I’m going to delete that one because it’s kind of hard to explain. But the other reason they might like this environment is because they can feed on the water in nutrients from the burst grapes. So, that’s a nice idea because I think that’s really easy to understand. So and these organisms prefer to survive it and they can feed on the water and nutrients from the burst grapes which we’ve already described them up, from the burst berries or grapes. Consequently, consumers, food industry, I think that we need a the there, consumers, the food industry and wine makers prefer grape bunches with certain values of compactness considered of higher quality. That’s a little bit wordy. Could we just maybe say prefer great bunches with optimal compactness? I don’t want to say with the lowest compactness because I think at some point low compactness is good, but at some point it becomes, the probably the grapes become to sparse, so optimal compactness. All right. So that just kind of trims that first paragraph a little bit makes it more manageable. Moving on to the second paragraph, we get some details about, really this paragraph is about the fact that there’s a lot of ways to measure bunch compactness, it’s not standardized and it’s also sort of subjective, because a lot of the measures are just kind of looking at it. So the first sentence here is a little bit misleading because the author talks about, what little is known about it’s genetic basis. So when I’m reading that and I’m then expecting the paragraph to be something about genetics which it actually isn’t. I think the idea here is just that it’s hard to do studies on things like genetics because we don’t have even a good way to measure this trait. But I think we can remove this mention of genetics, and then there’s a great sentence lower thus the lack of a globally accepted criterion and the subjectivity linked to a visual system makes it difficult to compare results between different studies. I think that’s the heart of this paragraph that there is no globally accepted criterion and the ones we have are subjective. So I think I’m just going to move that up, that concept up and put that in the first sentence, so the reader kind of gets an overview of this paragraph, knows where the author is going. So, I just change this slightly, despite the, I don’t know, if you need larger the agronomic and commercial relevance of bunch compactness. There is no globally. Here’s a use where I’m doing at there is, and I could think of a better way to put it than there is so I just went with there is, usually it’s useful. There is no globally accepted objective way, so no globally accepted objective, just going to say, way, to measure this trait. I think that’s the idea here, that we don’t have a good system for measuring this trait. I mean, we can get rid of all the stuff about the genetics. I also think we can get rid of the stuff about multifactorial and nature difficult to measure. We kind of get that all in this first sentence. So I think we can get rid of all of that. We can dive right into all the different ways that people do measure it. So we get then, many studies estimated according to visual descriptor proposed by, and while other authors- now notice we’ve got studies estimating and we’ve got authors developing. I think we should be consistent here technically a study can’t estimate anything, so maybe we use authors there. Many authors, and then we’ll just put while others here. So, some authors have done this, others have done that. So many authors estimated according to this, you know, wine society while others have developed specific visual ratings systems for its evaluation. And then maybe we put something like these varying and subjective, obviously visual is subjective, variance subjective measurements make it difficult to compare results between different sides. So obviously that’s a bad thing in terms of being able to study bunch compactness if you don’t even know how to measure it. Then we get this transition, trying to solve it. I think the author means trying to solve this problem. So just to make this, that doesn’t look quite right, so maybe to solve this problem. And we don’t need to repeat looking for a quantitative evaluation of bunch compactness. We already know that’s what this paragraph is about. So we can get rid of that. So to solve this problem, some authors, since we just said authors, I changed this to researchers also that authors kind of implies a particular study. So let’s just do some researchers, some researchers have indirectly evaluated this trait through the determination of other characteristics of the great bunch that vary with compactness. I wondered if we could just say, some researchers have tried indirect measurements. Right. So the visualization is try to measure it directly, but these other methods are trying to measure it indirectly. And then we can go right into those examples. So some researchers have tried indirect measurements including, let’s just go right into what types of indirect measurements they’ve tried, including and then, I’ve set this up, indirect measurements that’s nouns. So I’ve set this up now that we’re going to need a list of nouns. So including the degree, the measurement would be the degree of compression between the berries, measuring the force or maybe just to make this parallel, we need the degree, then the force, so measurements including the degree, the force created to create a certain gap between two contiguous berries, or the suppleness of the bunches determining the bending angle of the bunch. Something’s not quite right there. I actually think it’s what you’re measuring directly here is the bending angle, and that happens to indicate suppleness. So let say the bending angle of the bunch which indicates suppleness. So now we get all of these indirect ways of measuring bunch compactness that people are trying. Now when you get to the next paragraph I was slightly confused, because the next paragraph is also about indirect measurements. So in my mind I was trying to say well what’s different, what’s new that’s being introduced in this paragraph that’s different from the last paragraph. And I decided, I think what’s going on here is that there’s a whole set of indexes which have been proposed for measuring a bunch compactness and these are all based on things that are really easy to measure like size, volume and number. These are things that are probably easier to measure then, like degree of compression and force. I don’t know how you would measure forces and degrees of compression and bending angles. Those sounds kind of complicated whereas, you like just kind of estimating the volume or counting the grape sounds easier. So I think what’s new here, in this third paragraph is that people are trying to make up these indexes based on simple measurements like size and number. So I changed this to, this kind of introductory sentence to get across that idea. We know what’s going on in this paragraph. Others have created compactedness indexes and I wanted to get the idea that indexes up high in this paragraph. It’s kind of buried in there right now, based on size and number measurements. And then I thought we could just jump right into what those measurements are. So just including in them the author lists three of them. Now again I’ve set up for a list of nouns here, right, so, based on size and number measurements including, and then we’re going to have to say volume rather than volume metrically. So including the volume of empty spaces that appears, the volume that appears in bunches as they’re compactness decreases to by the number. Then we’re going to have to say, the number, weight or volume of the berries per centimeter of rachis and three again. We’re going have to do the noun here, and the relationship between the weight of the bunch and its morphological volume ratio can be considered as average density. Let’s instead of saying relationship, let’s just say from the beginning the ratio of, because that’s really the relationship we’re measuring. It’s the ratio of the weight of the bunch to its morphological volume. And then, if you wanted to know that that’s a measure of density, you can put that in parentheses, the measure of density. So those are the three indexes that have been proposed in the literature, and I don’t think we need to say that they’re published because we’ve already referenced them, that they’re published. We don’t need to repeat the fact that they’re in the literature because it’s sort of obvious from the references. The last sentence here goes into the idea that these seem to be the most promising ways of measuring bunch compactness. That’s why they’re highlighted in this separate paragraph. So what if we say these indexes are promising systems or promising measures for evaluating bunch compactness. And then the other says why that is, we don’t need the mainly here. There are promising measures because of their simplicity, their aplicability to lots of different great varieties and because they don’t require complex measuring devices or costly measuring devices. I actually think not requiring complex measuring devices is embedded in simplicity. You know, we could just say low cost, so maybe because of their simplicity, low cost and their potential applicability to different grape varieties, and I think now we’ve got the idea here so we can cut that. So these indexes are particularly promising. And now we jump to the aim of this study. The author started with a sort of little transition here in this sense, we don’t need that we can just start with the aim of the study that flows logically. The aim of this study of course was to evaluate the usefulness of these indexes, so the aim of the study was to evaluate the usefulness of several indexes, either previously published in the literature or newly designed presented by this group. And then we get for an objective and quantitative estimation of bunch compactness. We know that we need a measure for that. We know that that’s what we’re after here. The others nicely set up, that’s what we’re looking for, something objective and quantitative, so we don’t need to repeat that. We could just say for estimating bunch compactness and then we could say rather than that was useful for intervarietal studies of this trait. You could just say for estimating bunch compactness in intervarietal studies and we don’t need to repeat the trait. So you can see we’ve kind of trimmed this one a little bit and made it a little more reader friendly on the page.