Revising with Williams

Original Paragraph:
Fusion, EMU’s New Student Orientation, is a high energy, information
filled four-day program that occurs directly before the fall semester. Transfer
students may attend an abbreviated, one-day student orientation during fall
Fusion. A one-day version of Fusion is also offered just prior to the start of
winter semester. This program is mandatory for all new first-year students.
The First-Year Mentor Program at Eastern Michigan University complements the Orientation
program by creating enduring connections between first-year students and
upper-class peer mentors.

Revised Paragraph:
EMU’s New Student Orientation program, Fusion, is a four-day event held before the fall semester. A one-day Fusion program is offered in the fall and winter for transfer students. All first-year students must attend the program. The First-Year Mentor Program creates connections between new students and upper-class peer mentors.

This exercise was quite challenging but fun, too, because I am usually a wordy writer and it made me see just how unnecessary extra words really are! Williams points out a lot of great tips on how to write more clearly and I think that making the writing simple is what is most important. So for my revision I tried to cut down on the adjectives and the extras of "EMU" or "Eastern Michigan University" since anyone reading the catalog knows what school it's about anyway, right? :) For the first sentence, I omitted "high energy, information filled four-day program" because I simply thought all of those extra adjectives weren't necessary and actually sounded a bit awkward..."information filled four-day program"...I just didn't like it. I condensed it quite a bit and made it simple and straight-forward since Chapter 3 of Williams focused on Cohesion and how important it is to manage the flow of information. Next, instead of leaving the second and third sentences separate, I combined them since they were both directed to the same subject (transfer students). My reason for this, again, was because I think the combination of the sentences allowed the writing to flow a bit better than it did to split the two separate, similar thoughts, which Williams emphasizes in Chapter 3. The next sentence was quite short already, but I felt that the subject could be switched from Fusion, since the reader is already aware that it's the topic of the paragraph, to the fact that all students must attend. I did this because the fact that the participation of ALL students is the key idea here, it should be stated first to show emphasis, one of Williams' main points in Chapter 4 when he discusses managing endings. The most important information should be listed first, not as the ending. Lastly, I mainly omitted words that were just taking up extra space, like Eastern Michigan University and the Orientation program, since they weren't needed. Also, I simplified the wording and structure of the sentence to make it more clear, using Williams' advice: "Express actions and conditions in specific verbs." I feel that the way I wrote it made it more specific in that it got to the point of the sentence rather than using fillers to add length and wordiness as the writer did in the original paragraph. In the end, I really enjoyed this exercise and reading Williams' advice. I think the book is an excellent writing resource and will definitely come in handy for me in the future.