PREPARING A WRITTEN TEXT FOR USE
Once a written text has been selected, it may be edited in a number of different ways. From the least to the most drastic, they are:
1. Correction of typographical errors. Even this much editing is not always desirable: students must become accustomed sometime to making their own adjustments as they read.
2. Partial rewriting of one or two sentences which, though quite correct and idiomatic, nevertheless contain more than their share of difficult constructions.
3. Rewriting the entire original, using shorter, simpler sentences but retaining the same vocabulary.
Here is an example of complete rewriting. The original text is a single sentence:
'In 1919, under the post-world War I Treaty of Saint Germain the Italian frontier was established along the "natural" and strategic boundary, the Alpine watershed.'
Rivers (1968, p. 210) has said that the student 'must try...to express...meaning...with correct use of uncomplicated structural patterns and a basic general-purpose vocabulary.' The above sentence is neither extremely long nor extremely complicated, but it is still too long and complicated to be manageable for any but advanced students. If it is to serve as a basis for drills, it may be broken up into very short, very simple sentences that use the same vocabulary to say the same thing:
The nations signed the treaty of Saint Germain.
373
