The editing standard is not word count. It is whether each element advances the argument.

THE STANDARD

Every element stays or goes by one test: does this advance the argument? Everything that does stays, regardless of how much effort it took. Everything that does not comes out, regardless of how accurate it is. Students who do not have this standard do not cut when asked to because they believe everything is necessary. Showing them the standard concretely changes what they cut.

THE ONE-IDEA-PER-SLIDE PRINCIPLE

Topic-organized (one cluttered slide): Environmental Effects of Plastic Waste • Ocean pollution • Wildlife mortality • Microplastics • Soil contamination • Recycling inefficiency

Argument-organized (three specific slides): Plastic waste in the ocean exceeds 150M metric tons. / Microplastics appear in 77% of tested human blood. / Recycling programs recover less than 9% of all plastic.

Six bullets announcing a topic vs. three claims each supported by evidence. The second version is longer as a presentation. Each slide makes an argument the audience can accept or push back on.

WHAT TO CUT

Background information the audience already knows. Included to demonstrate knowledge. Does not advance the claim.

Facts related to the topic but not to the specific claim. If you cannot state in one sentence why a fact is necessary for the audience to accept the claim, it is probably clutter.

Repeated information. A conclusion that restates is not a conclusion. A conclusion that answers “so what?” is.

THE SPREADSHEET PARALLEL

Thirty columns when the argument depends on three forces the reader to scan for relevance. A clean spreadsheet presents the data the argument depends on, labeled clearly, with irrelevant columns removed or moved to a reference sheet.

WHAT THIS LOOKS LIKE IN GUIDED SCHOLAR

Guided Scholar’s Teach Me mode asks, for each section: how does this support the overall argument? When content does not connect to the claim, the feedback makes the gap explicit. The teacher sees the original submission and the revised version side by side, making the editing decision visible as an instructional event.

PRACTICAL STARTING POINTS
  • 1. Show two versions of the same presentation. One with all gathered information. One with only what advances the argument. Ask which is more persuasive. This gives students the standard.
  • 2. Require one complete idea per slide, stated as a sentence. Not a topic label. A claim the audience can evaluate.
  • 3. Apply the same test to spreadsheets. Does this column advance the argument? If not, remove it or move it to a reference sheet.
  • 4. Make the editing standard explicit in the rubric. Does every element of this submission advance the argument? Make necessity a graded criterion.

Sources: Tufte, Visual Display of Quantitative Information (2001); Atkinson, Beyond Bullet Points (2007); Williams, The Non-Designer’s Design Book (2004)