MP's possible cuts

After looking over the 39 pages of the manuscript, I've got some ideas for cuts. Hopefully, many of these overlap with Jeremiah's and we'll find 9 pages shortly.

1. Redundant bios at beginning and end of manuscript; I vote we delete the bios on p. 39 as this gains us a page.

2. For me, some deleting and tightening can occur in the metaphors section. In particular, I think the information architecture section could be one paragraph (p. 6). We can cut the paragraph quoting Nicole Brown and combine the others. The ecology section could be two paragraphs (down from 4).

3. The where section, in which we outline infrastructure, can be trimmed. I nominate the paragraph beginning with Borgmann and including the long quote from Starr (pp.10-11). Also, on p.11, the paragraph beginning "We believe..." can be cut except for the first line, which can maybe be placed in next paragraph. This gets us more quickly to how what we are doing is different/new.

4. To my mind, p. 13, which focuses largely on how this focus impacts our majors, can be significantly cut. This is frustrating as I think the reviewers asked us to add some of this in.

5. I find it hard to say this next potential cut, since the practitioners' history has always been an important element to me. However, what if we revised the history section so that it opened with the most recent iteration of the course. We could then include a few sentences looking back at previous approaches.

6. The section on collaboration stations can be shortened--especially towards the end. This would allow us to delete Figure 1 (the course handout, p.23). I don't have specific paragraphs to delete but I'm wondering how we can get to the reason for including collab station section sooner. Then by deleting the figure, we can also delete references to using the handout in class.

7. Our concluding section could be two paragraphs. Jeremiah just told me he thinks the Yancey can be cut (or that's what I heard!). At the least, it could be shortened considerably and briefly noted in opening of para. 3 in that section. The last paragraph could be cut or, actually, maybe the final two paragraphs could be cut.

I don't know how many pages those cuts get us, and some of that will depend on the domino effect caused by the deletion of sources and footnotes (JD mentioned footnote 11 as a possible cut and I agree). After looking over the draft, however, I'm much less worried about how the loss of 9 pages will hurt the article. It will still make its point.

mp