MLDR 6905 Week 10 Capstone Coherence Edit Example

Rewriting Every Seam: A Coherence Edit of the Cedar Hollow Case That Redrafts Section Endings and Openings as Pairs, Fixes Four Terms and Makes the Position Sentence Identical Wherever It Appears

Student Name

Walden University

MLDR 6905: Capstone: A Case for Leaders as Change Agents

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Rewriting Every Seam: A Coherence Edit of the Cedar Hollow Case That Redrafts Section Endings and Openings as Pairs, Fixes Four Terms and Makes the Position Sentence Identical Wherever It Appears

Why Seams

The Cedar Hollow case was drafted over eight weeks, one section at a time. Each section reads well alone. A reader moving from one to the next, however, crosses a seam where the topic, the terms and sometimes the voice shift without warning. Williams and Bizup (2017) recommend that sentences begin with information the reader already holds and end with what is new, so that each sentence prepares the next. The same principle applies at a larger scale: each section's opening should pick up the idea the previous section left the reader holding. This edit rewrites the ten seams between the case's sections as pairs, fixes four terms that had drifted and makes the position sentence identical wherever it appears.

Seam Log

The rewritten pairs share a pattern. The old closings tended to end on a summary of the section just finished. The rewritten closings end on the question or condition the next section takes up, and the rewritten openings begin with it. The context section, for example, used to end by listing five conditions and then hand the reader to a letter addressed to the Linden director without explanation. It now ends on the condition that matters most to her, a staffed service point at Linden, and the stakeholder case begins with the loss that condition is meant to soften.

Table 1

Selected Seams, Before and After

Composite case. Four of the ten seam entries are shown; the full log has one entry per boundary.

Term List

Four terms had drifted across sections. The case now uses one form of each throughout.

Shared-services unit, never "hub," "central office" or "the center." "Central office" in particular called up the earlier centralization the case argues it is not repeating.

Learners, never "customers" or "students." The literature on shared services uses "internal customers" for campuses, and the word had leaked into descriptions of learners, which the Linden director would rightly find cold. Students, in the college's own usage, are credit students, which continuing education learners are not.

Campus director, never "site lead." The informal term came from the author's own campus and does not match the college's titles.

The rural campus is called the Linden campus throughout, never "the small campus" or "the outlying campus," both of which imply its lesser importance.

Voice

The case had mixed first and third person without a rule. The edit fixes one: first person appears only in the stakeholder case, where the author addresses the Linden director directly, and in the brief section on the author's role. Every other section uses third person. This keeps the stakeholder case personal, as an address to one reader should be, without making the analysis sections sound like a memoir. Sword (2012) notes that writers who use the first person deliberately, rather than avoiding or overusing it, tend to produce clearer academic prose.

The Position Sentence

The position appeared five times in the draft, in four different wordings. One version said "within a year," another "by next fall"; one omitted "scheduling"; one said campuses keep "programs" rather than "program design." Each variation weakened the claim that the position had held since Week 2. All five appearances now match the Week 2 sentence word for word, including "within twelve months" and "program design."

What the Edit Did Not Change

The edit changed wording, order within paragraphs and transitions. It changed no figure, no ground and no commitment. Where a seam rewrite tempted a new claim, the claim was left out and noted for the limits section. A reader comparing the drafts can trace every change through the log. The early wins that Weick (1984) describes depend on credibility, and a case whose wording shifted between sections would spend credibility the plan needs.

References

Sword, H. (2012). Stylish academic writing. Harvard University Press.

Weick, K. E. (1984). Small wins: Redefining the scale of social problems. American Psychologist, 39(1), 40-49. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.39.1.40

Williams, J. M., & Bizup, J. (2017). Style: Lessons in clarity and grace (12th ed.). Pearson.