Week 11 Sim Session: Audit workshop

Bring the draft, get it attacked by somebody who wants it to be wrong, and find out which of your phrases has no failure behind it

19 May 2027

The audit is due Friday. Bring a draft, however rough — an outline with real evidence in it is more use here than a polished document with none.

In the session#

Read-arounds, forty minutes. Groups of three. Each draft is read by the other two, whose job is explicitly adversarial: find the phrase that has no failure behind it.

Every proposal has at least one. It is usually a phrase that sounds professional, fills an obvious gap, and was not derived from anything you observed. Cutting it improves the submission and the marking rewards the cut.

Evidence audit, twenty-five minutes. For each claim in your draft, one of: I observed this, I read this in a published transcript, or I assumed this. Written next to the claim.

The third category is always larger than people expect. Assumptions are allowed — they are not allowed to be invisible.

Limits clinic, twenty-five minutes. With Noor or Priya, individually. One question: how could your proposal make things worse?

If you cannot answer, week 10 is the template. You are replacing a lossy, messy, shared channel with something cleaner and more constrained. What was the messy version doing for free? Who could speak before who cannot now? What gets said in the gaps you are about to close?

The strongest limits sections in past years have concluded that the proposal should not be adopted as it stands. That is a full-marks answer to this criterion, and it surprises people every year.

What we will push back on hardest#

Proposals with no evidence. A phrase table derived from what you imagine a nurse says. It reads exactly like what it is, and Priya will say so.

Domains with no pressure. If nothing is lost when the exchange fails, you have described a convention rather than a protocol.

Anything that required consent you did not get. If you observed people at work, we will ask how they knew. This is not negotiable and it is better raised now than after submission.

Afterwards#

Due Friday noon. Two things are worth doing between now and then: cut the phrase you were told has no failure behind it, and write the limits section last, when you have stopped being fond of the proposal.