TOLERANCE

An Exercise in Critical Thinking and Editorial Review

Purpose:

Like many other exercises, the best place to start with learning about writing is to review and criticize someone else's work. This first assignment will assist you in familiarizing you with the problems of writing and the pitfalls that you can expect to find in your own work. You should review the section of the pages on writing which refer to the process of reviewing.

Assignment:

Through the WWW locate the article on Tolerance. Print off a copy and read it. As you read it mark it up (preferably with a red marker) for spelling and grammatical errors. Then concern yourself with the three other items mentioned in the "process of reviewing" article:

Has the writer met the expectations of his intended readers in terms of quality and salience of ideas, organization and support, and usage, mechanics, and punctuation?
Are the central ideas clear, correct, appropriate, and adequately developed?
Is the paper organized in some acceptable fashion so that the parts stick together and one part leads to the next?

Answer these questions by giving specific examples on how the paper may be improved.

Then answer these questions:

Are there other aspects of the topic (Tolerance) that have been overlooked? Are there better examples that would bring out concerns more appropriately?
How are Tolerance and Diversity related? What do you think about that, and how might that action be incorporated into this paper?

Due Date: 28 September 1998

Hand-ins:

A cover sheet with your name, assignment title, and course number. DO NOT include your student identification number.
The marked-up copy of the original article on Tolerance from the WWW.
The detailed answers to the questions posed above. (NOTE: In the Web page on Writing which covers the topic of reviews, 12 other questions are posed about the paper you are reading. In this assignment you may restrict yourself to the questions asked above. In reviewing for a colleague in Assignment #3 use the 12 questions version.)

NOTE: It is NOT necessary to include a journal with this assignment.