Preserve the project's useful capacity
Read for meaning first. Select a highlighted word if you want a closer look.
A substandard exhibition catalog arrives with unreadable captions and missing pages, falling below the readable and complete version the team agreed to produce. A rule forbidding any change after the first draft would stultify the students' work by preventing them from correcting the problems they discovered. Removing every worked illustration would emasculate the catalog's teaching purpose by taking away the examples on which its explanations depend. The editor asks the group to identify which revisions restore useful function and which merely make the publication thinner or easier to approve.
The substandard captions cannot be repaired by praise for the cover, because readers still need to identify the models on display. To stultify the revision process with an absolute ban would preserve known mistakes and inhibit the students' ability to develop the work. The editor also refuses a cut that would emasculate the instructional sections while leaving their headings intact. Instead, the team repairs the missing pages, restores readable captions, and keeps the illustrations that make each explanation usable for a visitor encountering the model for the first time.
Before you move on
Look away from the passage. Can you explain each focus word in your own words?
Original fictional passages for vocabulary practice.