The last check

Checking adds not a single point to what has been written. It gives back the ones the text has already lost: the length deduction is fixed as a number in advance and costs between one and six points, and part of what gets taken off for language is visible to the naked eye in a minute.

Which is why there is no list handed out in advance here. There is somebody else's finished comment, and at each point you are asked to find a place in it that is already costing marks.

Somebody else's comment and five minutes

One table is needed at every point below, so keep it in view.

Here is the post being answered, and it is the only one in this article.

"Our Street Got a Bench and Everything Changed", by Nadia Farkas ("nadia.walks"), 14/03/2021

Last spring the city spent two years and a lot of money redesigning the square at the end of our street. Nobody goes there. In September someone from the housing office put a plain wooden bench outside the bakery, probably because a delivery van had nowhere to park. Since then I have learned the names of eleven neighbours I had lived beside for six years.

A bench is not a project, it is an invitation. I am starting to think we ask the city for the wrong things: we ask for plans, when what we need is somewhere to sit down for two minutes.

So tell me: how much of what your street needs would fit on one bench?

The three content points printed under it:

1. summarise Nadia's view on small changes to a street in one sentence and comment on it;
2. discuss the reasons why a place to sit changes how neighbours behave;
3. suggest one thing your own street could add, and say what would change.

And here is somebody's comment on it, written through to the end and, by the look of it, finished.

pavel_h, 16/03/2021, 08:05 p.m.

Hi Nadia, I've read this twice, and I think you're right that one plain bench did more for your street than the whole square did.

People sit down for two minutes and end up talking for twenty. That is not sentimental, it is just what happens when standing up is the only other option. In my building nobody knew anybody until our caretaker discussed about two old chairs with the owner. He put them next to the letterboxes, where everyone has to stop anyway. By the end of the summer the whole floor knew each other by name. A bench is not a project, it is an invitation.

My own street is wide, with a bakery that opens at six and a bus stop where everybody waits in the rain. There is a low wall outside the pharmacy where people already sit. It is cold and much too narrow for two, and they sit there anyway. On warm evenings you see four or five of them there until it gets dark, and the man from the shop is always one of them. The chairs that our caretaker found them in the cellar cost nothing and needed no permission. Nobody had asked for them, and nobody has moved them since.

What would you put on yours?

Point 0, counted for you. This comment runs to 215 words. By the table above that is the 224–210 band, so one mark off, taken before the marker has read the first sentence. Not one of the errors below has been found yet, and the mark is already gone.

The points after this are not counted for you. The text above stays open: everything you will be looking for is in it.

What is already lost here

Here is the second paragraph of the comment in full. One of its six sentences came to Pavel for free, and it shows the moment you put it next to the post.

Lifting from the post means somebody else's words standing as your own. The scale names it outright, in three bands of Structural and lexical range (Range from here on): some prompt lifting in the band 3 description, phrases lifted from the prompt in band 2, frequent lifting of phrases from the prompt in band 1. The descriptions of bands 4 and 5 have no room for it. The reason is not honesty but that Range measures your own stock of words: a sentence written by the author of the post says nothing about that stock.

And the borrowed words are not free space. They count towards the 250 exactly as your own do, so every borrowed sentence is a sentence of your own that is not there.

That is somebody else's words dealt with. The next loss sits not in a sentence but in a whole paragraph, and its arithmetic works differently.

A content point is closed by its verb, not by its topic. Suggest is closed by a proposal, compare by a comparison, discuss the reasons by a reason actually named. A paragraph on the same topic without that verb leaves the point undone, and Task achievement is banded on exactly that: all three points addressed but not fully developed is the band 3 description, only two points addressed is band 2.

Hence the way to check: not re-reading the text straight through, but putting the three content points beside it and finding, for each, the sentence that closes it. If no sentence turns up, the paragraph on that topic changes nothing.

The eye does not count words

The number 215 in point 0 did not come from a feeling. It had to be counted, and the very first line of the comment shows why.

A marker counts by their own rules, and the rules are short. User name and date do not count. A contracted form is one word. Everything else counts, the greeting and the closing question included.

Estimating does not work, even for someone who writes calmly. That is not a fault of the writer but a property of the eye: the difference between 215 words and 230 is invisible on the page, and by the table one of them costs a mark and the other costs nothing. Count, line by line, and write the total at the bottom.

The number is counted and the deduction is known. What is left is deciding what to do with it, and there is no longer time for everything.

Lines you have already read

Now four lines out of the same comment. You have read them already, whole, in one piece, several screens back, and noticed nothing in them. With your own text that is the normal state of affairs.

Look for a class, not for "mistakes". Re-reading 250 words "carefully" in three minutes cannot be done: the second time round the eye runs along the same places and sees the same things. One pass per class of word works differently: you look not at the sense but at the articles, then at the pronouns, then at the prepositions after verbs, and the extra word falls out by itself.

Those three classes are worth a pass each because an extra word of that kind leaves the sentence sounding almost right when you read for sense: an article before a noun meant in general, a pronoun that repeats a subject or an object already there, a preposition after a verb that takes its object directly. Reading for sense slides over them; looking at one class of word at a time does not.

You have met the same move in the editing task, where extra words are crossed out line by line, and the difference between that task and your own text is the one thing worth taking away from here.

Editing: there the line is marked up for you, here nobody marks anything

In editing you are promised no more than one extra word per line, and exactly ten lines. In your own comment nothing is promised: not how many errors, not which lines carry them, not even that there is only one per sentence. The only thing that carries over is the movement of the eye; the arithmetic of "found one, so I can stop looking" does not.

The second comment, nothing marked up

Below is another answer to the same post. There is no explanation after each point here, as on the real sheet, where there is one comment and no second opinion about it.

marta.k, 16/03/2021

Hi Nadia, you say we ask the city for the wrong things, and after this winter I think you are right about that.

Our courtyard has a table that the previous tenants left behind, and it is the only reason I know my neighbours at all. The family who live above the bakery they complained about the noise for a week. Then they started sitting there in the evenings themselves, with their own chairs. Nobody plans that, and nobody could have written it into a plan. A place to sit costs one afternoon and a screwdriver, while the square at the end of your street cost two years. I think the society changes one table at a time.

My street has no bench and a very wide pavement that nobody uses for anything. Our neighbours have talked about a second table since last autumn. So far the talking is the only thing that has happened. We could ask the bakery on the corner to leave two crates outside on Saturdays. People would stand there for ten minutes with their bread instead of walking straight home. By spring somebody would bring a chair, and after that nobody would need permission for anything at all.

I would rather have two crates on a Saturday than another meeting about the pavement. Do you think a bench works anywhere, or only on a street where people already have a reason to stop?

The third content point asked for something to be suggested for the writer's own street. There are six sentences in a row about that street here.

One sentence out of six did what Pavel's whole paragraph did not. Now the same lines again, but looked at differently: not at what they do, but at what they are made of.

The lines have been gone through, the opening of the comment has not. It is short, and what can be held against it is not grammar.

What to take away

The order to go through it in, if five minutes are left and not twenty:

1. Put the three content points beside the text and find, for each, the sentence that closes it. Not a paragraph on the topic, but a sentence with the right verb.
2. Count the words. Name and date do not count, a contraction is one word. If it comes to less than 225, writing more matters more than correcting.
3. Check against the post: other people's phrasings standing as your own.
4. One pass per class: articles, then pronouns that repeat a noun already there, then prepositions after verbs.

The first two actions win marks back by arithmetic, the third and fourth by looking. The order is exactly that because arithmetic does not depend on whether you are tired.

Blog Comment: two ways to score zero on a full page Editing: the same movement of the eye, but with the lines marked up The language itself: what to rewrite in a sentence while there is still time