Revising with Williams

Original:
"Student Government at EMU is committed to improving the quality of student life on campus. The student body each spring elects a president, vice president and 24 senators who, along with representatives appointed from various organizations, compose the Student Senate. The executive officers and members provide input to the administration of the University to help solve problems and improve programs and services. Student Government also sponsors campus-wide events. The student services office, known as REACT, provides assistance to students with legal, rental or University-related problems."

My Revision:
Student Government at EMU is committed to improving the quality of life on campus. They provide input to University administration to help solve problems and improve services. The student services office, known as REACT, provides assistance to students with legal, rental or University-related problems. Student Government also sponsors campus-wide events.

The Student Senate is composed of a president, vice president, 24 senators and organization representatives. The student body elects the president, vice president and senators each spring. The representatives are appointed by various organizations.

I chose this passage because the sentences did not flow together. It seemed like the writer just wrote four sentences about the student government at random and stuck them together to create a paragraph.

In chapter three of Style:Toward Clarity and Grace, Joseph Williams discusses cohesion of sentences. His main pointis that each sentence should have a topic and that the topic is clear to the reader. He also discusses the difference between a psychological subject and a grammatical subject. The pyschological subject, he says, is the topic of a sentence. Williams also says that often times the psychological subject and grammatical subject are the same(50).

The first sentence of the above paragraph was the topic sentence. The topic is the "quality of student life on campus". The rest of the sentences didn't flow with that topic. The very next sentence had to do with how the members of the student government are appointed.

After reading that student government is committed to improving quality of life readers will most likely ask how. This is answered through the next question: "by providing input". Readers might also be asking themselves what else does the student government do? sponsors campus-wide events. I left in the part about student services, but I wasn't sure if this group was a part of the student government.

How the members of the government are appointed had nothing to do with the topic so I created a new paragraph. Williams says, "at the beginning of a series of sentences, create a reasonably consistent topic string"(52). By putting the information about elections into the same paragraph as the committment of the student government the writer is not creating a reasonably consistent topic string.