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Proofing

Proof #1

From first proof to final print

Proof #2

Editing Sample

1) While grade inflation has been a subject of debate by teachers and administrators and even in newspapers, employers looking for people with high levels of technical and analytical skills have not had difficulty identifying desirable candidates.

Despite grade inflation, employers have not had difficulty finding technically and analytically skilled candidates.

2) Although one way to prevent foreign piracy of videos and CDs is in the criminal justice systems of foreign countries and for cases to move faster through their systems and for stiffer penalties to be imposed, no improvement in the level of expertise of judges who hear these cases is expected any time in the immediate future. These sentences are interrupted. First, eliminate wordiness, and then correct the interruption.

To prevent piracy, greater cooperation with foreign countries and harsher sentences are required, but it will be impossible if more experienced judges do not hear these cases.

3) TV talk shows, because they have an appeal to our fascination with real life conflict because of our voyeuristic impulses, are about the most popular shows that are regularly scheduled to appear on TV.

TV talk shows are amongst the most popular and regularly scheduled shows due to their voyeuristic appeal.

4) The merit selection of those who are judges, given the low quality and character of elected officials, is an idea whose time came long ago.

To better select judges, a test of merit is required to prevent low quality candidates.

5) Within the period of the last few years or so, automobile manufacturers have been trying to meet new and more stringent-type quality control requirements. [a challenge]

The new requirements which automobile manufacturers have been trying to meet require more strict quality control. The manufacturers have been attempting to push back on these new standards, due to a decrease in profits.

6) The successful accomplishment of test-tube fertilization of embryos has raised many issues of an ethical nature that continue to trouble both scientists and laypeople. [an event]

7) Having no previous familiarity with it, the metal detection device did not function as expected.

The metal detection device did not work properly, as I had no prior experience using it.

8) With every expectation of success, new efforts to resolve the differences that have resulted in interference with communication are necessary.

Success requires confronting and resolving any issues in our communication.

9) Realizing that the undergraduate curriculum must be completely reevaluated in the next few weeks, proposals have suddenly appeared on the agenda that had received earlier attention but were rejected.

Due to the immediacy of the restructuring of the undergraduate curriculum, several proposals which were previously rejected have been revisited.

Academic Writing Sample

Identity and Imagined Cities: The Fictionalized and the Fictional

What is a city? The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines it as, “an inhabited place of greater size, population, or importance than a town or village,” the Oxford English Dictionary defines it as, “A large or important municipality.” These definitions describe what a city is, but they fail to capture what a city means, why they are significant, and why they are the backdrop of so many pieces of art since human settlements could have been called cities. Besides their physical designation, cities contain complex social, political, and economic circumstances in which people live, labor, struggle, and die. They are places that people love and hate, they are large or small, and they have shaped the modern world. Because of this they not only contain real stories but have been instrumental in inspiring some of the greatest pieces of art. In James Joyce’s Ulysses, Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, and Michael Heizer’s City the city not only functions as a physical place but as a medium for exploring identity, perception, and immersion. Cities reveal the relationship people have with where they live, and how those places contain universal elements of the human experience.

Throughout the course of Ulysses James Joyce attempts to capture the truth of the human experience through an experimental stream of consciousness that examines how our identity is shaped by the ways in which we perceive the world, through our senses and through external influences. Joyce accomplishes this through his stressing of the body’s senses as a medium through which we can understand ourselves and the world. But, more simply, it is a novel about a single, normal day as it is experienced by various inhabitants of Dublin. It is through the people that the city is reflected, and the reality of the human experience is revealed. In the ninth chapter of Ulysses, Stephen is giving a lecture on Shakespeare in which he states, “Every life is in many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves.” (175) The first part of this passage focuses on how life is divided into a series of many days. The phrase, “day after day,” situates each day as separate from the days that came before it and those that will come after it. With the novel taking place over just one day, we are only able to view a fraction of the lives of Stephen, Leopold, and Molly. Yet, we come to understand who they are so deeply, we see how they think, perceive, feel, respond to themselves, other people, and the city of Dublin. In the second part of the passage Stephen acknowledges how someone can only experience the world through their own singular perspective, but in meeting others we can see a reflection of ourselves, “We walk through ourselves…but always meeting ourselves.” Joyce characterizes identity as something that cannot exist in a vacuum; we are influenced by others and through others we come to understand ourselves. The city of Dublin itself in this way acts as a mirror—Stephen, Leopold, and Molly can see parts of themselves reflected in the city, just as the city can be seen in them. The people of a city and the city itself are intertwined; Joyce suggests that one cannot exist without the other without losing some part of their identity.

The final line of Ulysses, “Trieste-Zurich-Paris 1914-1921,” (Joyce 644) appears at first to be a nondescript line, a simple sign-off by Joyce to end out the novel, but upon closer inspection it points to the physical distance between himself and Dublin. The three cities listed, Trieste, Zurich, and Paris, are all places that he lived while writing Ulysses, none of which are in Ireland. Joyce, much like the characters of Ulysses, finds that he is unable to separate himself from the city that he was born and raised in. So, he wished to recreate the city itself in his work, “I want to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book.” (Bugden F. Ch. 4) He was able to reconstruct Dublin with an exactness that captured the movement of clouds across Dublin’s sky and the measurement of the amount of time it would have taken someone to walk from one place to another. But over a century has passed since Ulysses was published Joyce’s Dublin no longer exists. What is left is merely a fictionalized rendering of Dublin and its people, in other words, a real city that has been translated into fiction. This fictional city then informs us about how Joyce viewed Dublin. In the seventh chapter of Ulysses Joyce uses experimental form, choosing to break up the chapter with news headlines every couple of paragraphs. One headline stands out among the rest, “Dear Dirty Dublin,” (119) it feels as if Joyce its addressing the city itself in this novel. He brings into focus all aspects of life in Dublin displaying the bare truth of the city. The use of the word “Dirty” between “Dear,” and “Dublin” points to how Joyce feels about the city, it is dirty and grotesque, it is not a perfect city, but it is the one that he loves. Just a few lines prior on the same page Stephen thinks, “Dublin. I have much much to learn.” Stephen, who is often regarded as Joyce’s alter ego, realizes that through the city and its people he can learn a lot about the human experience. He used Ulysses not only to remember his home but to explore the universal truths that can be found in cities, “For myself, I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal.” (Ellman 505) Joyce found universality in the cities he lived in while away from Dublin. They provided him a fresh perspective on both Ireland and Dublin as he wrote Ulysses and explored the truths that can be found in others as well as through one’s bodily senses.

In contrast to Ulysses, Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino explores dozens of fictional cities rather than a singular fictionalized city. The novel is framed as a dialogue between two characters, Marco Polo, who has been tasked with visiting the cities of the Mongol Empire, and Kublai Khan, the Mongol emperor, who in his old age cannot leave his palace. Fifty-five fictional cities organized in eleven different categories are described throughout the novel, which are interspersed with conversations between the two of them. Language and imagination are central to the novel, as Marco Polo tells the Khan of fantastical and impossible cities which supposedly make up his empire. In a dialogue between Polo and the Khan Polo reflects on the nature of storytelling, “‘I speak and speak,’ Marco says, ‘but the listener retains only the words he is expecting. … It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear.’” (135) Calvino highlights how language, no matter how accurate, cannot accurately recreate what one has seen, experienced, or known exactly in another person’s mind. They interpret the words that someone else in saying, reconstructing their own version of it in their mind. To Kublai Khan the cities that Marco Polo describes may very well be a part of his empire. He cannot visit them in person; he must trust that Marco Polo is presenting to him accurate stories of his travels. When Marco Polo is being tested by the Khan on his knowledge of the cities of the world he remarks, “Traveling, you realize that differences are lost: each city takes to resembling all cities, places exchange their form, order, distances, a shapeless dust cloud invades the continents. Your atlas preserves the differences intact: that assortment of qualities which are like the letters in a name.” (137) Polo highlights the near universal nature of the cities of the world, they share characteristics, shape, and structure. He points out to Kublai Khan that his atlas merely captures the cities as they were when it was written. Calvino’s useage of the word “exchange” implies that all cities share qualities, borrowing, taking, or replacing aspects of themselves for others. And, just as Joyce believed that if he could capture Dublin in his writing that he could illustrate something about all the cities of the world, Calvino Believes that within each city, all cities can be found.

Much like Joyce’s connection with Dublin, Marco Polo’s identity in Invisible Cities is bound to his home city of Venice. In an exchange Kublai Khan observes, “‘There is still one of which you never speak.’ Marco Polo bowed his head. ‘Venice,’ the Khan said. Marco smiled. ‘What else do you believe I have been talking to you about?’ The emperor did not tum a hair. ‘And yet I have never heard you mention that name.’ And Polo said: ‘Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice.’” (86) For Marco Polo, every city contains aspects of Venice—defined by what they lack in comparison, and what they possess that Venice does not. Each city he visits is filtered through the lens of Venice; in speaking of other cities, he indirectly illustrates Venice, and by extension, himself. Later in the same conversation, Marco Polo explains why he has refrained from describing Venice, “Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice all at once, if I speak of it. Or perhaps, speaking of other cities, I have already lost it, little by little.” (87) Polo fears that if he describes his home, he will fail to capture its essence. That once he imparts the details of his home it will crystallize in the Khan’s mind as something that it is not. For now, Polo’s conception of Venice lives in his imagination, without a definite shape. Instead, he chooses to bring the Khan into his imagination, to tell him of cities that do not exist, but instead tell him about universal aspects of the human experience: culture, connection, life and death, language, distance, and time. This idea is echoed in the description of the city of Valdrada, a city built beside a lake, “Thus the traveler, arriving, sees two cities: one erect above the lake, and the other reflected, upside down. Nothing exists or happens in the one Valdrada that the other Valdrada does not repeat, because the city was so constructed that its every point would be reflected in its mirror.” (56) Valdrada exists as both a physical city as well as the refraction of light on water, inverted and symmetrical, but not identical. The reflected Valdrada is intangible, it cannot be reached, only observed, and yet it displays the city from a new and different perspective. Calvino suggests that reflections, fiction, and imagination can tell us much more about a place or a person than direct observation ever could.

Michael Heizer’s City is a massive land sculpture that lies in central-eastern Nevada. Construction began in 1970, fifty-two years and forty million dollars later it was completed. Though described as a sculpture or even land art, it would be more apt to call it a monument. It is a mile and a half long and a mile wide structure consisting of a complex series of mounds, depressions, slopes, trenches, and curbs. It is made of dirt, rock, gravel, and concrete. Limited to only six visitors a day, you must buy tickets well in advance, and once you are inside you are not allowed to take pictures, though of course people have snuck cameras in and snapped a few photos (City 1970-2022). So, why is it called City if it is just a series of mounds and trenches? This is Heizer’s point. City is a work that is critical of artificiality while simultaneously forcing the observer to become immersed in the constructed environment. The sculpture explores how form can evoke emotion, and to immerse an observer. In Jackson Arn’s essay, “The Sphere and Our ‘Immersion’ Complex,” he discusses the Las Vegas Sphere, a massive music and entertainment venue covered in LED lights on both inside and out, he contrasts it with Michael Heizer’s City, “like the Sphere, [City] is an immersive experience. You have to do more of the immersing yourself, but, partly for that reason, it ends up making a more successful attack on your senses. For three hours, your perceptions dilate and time slows down… As I snapped out of my trance, the sculpture felt not large but infinite.” (para. 13) He describes the structure in a way that makes it seem as if you become lost in its shape, the mountains appear to be almost part of the exhibit, time does not seem real. Believing that something is real requires immersion. Writers like James Joyce and Italo Calvino understood this. Joyce immersed his readers in Dublin through his use of characters and the senses, Calvino and Marco Polo immersed the reader and Kublai Khan through impossibly fantastical conceptual cities, and Heizer immersed people in his sculpture by taking them far from civilization into the desert to witness timeless artificial hills.

Cities define and shape who we are and how we understand the world, for Joyce it was Dublin, for Calvino he used Venice, the home of Marco Polo, and Heizer created his own out in the Nevada desert. The people define the city through their shared qualities as displayed by Joyce through Stephen, Leopold, and Molly. They reflect their qualities, both good and bad, and the city reflects them back. Joyce used his characters to reconstruct Dublin within his novel, to bring it to life by illustrating the bodily sensations one experiences when there. And much like Joyce, Calvino created his fictionalized Marco Polo to be forever bound to his home of Venice, he sees it in every city he visits. Calvino examines how stories create imagined realities that exist in different states for everyone who hears them. He also commented on the form of cities, how they change, and how all cities may appear almost the same except in name. Heizer labored in the desert for fifty years to create his sculpture of dirt, gravel, and concrete. Its name prompts comments on artificiality and form while asking the question, what is a city? A city, as illustrated by these texts, is something that is personal, universal, and immersive, it can inform us about who we are, where we live, and where we have come from. Cities and people cannot live outside of context, they can only be defined and understood through contrast. We make them, and they make us.