Commonplace Book of Cuts

A running collection of omissions you noticed in the wild, kept from week one and submitted at the end of week five

Due: 26 March 2027 · Weight: 20%

The brief

Starting in week 1, keep a running log of omissions you notice — in anything you read, watch, hear, use or make, not only in course material. Each entry: what’s missing, where exactly you found it, and one to three sentences on what leaving it out cost and what it bought.

By the end of week 5 you should have at least eight entries spanning at least four different disciplines, and at least one entry from something that has nothing to do with this course’s set reading.

Submission format

A single Markdown or plain-text file, entries in date order, each headed with the date you noticed it (not the date you wrote it up). Late entries backfilled after the fact are obvious and marked accordingly.

What this is testing

Whether you can find the semester’s pattern unprompted, in material nobody assigned you — the skill the rest of the course assumes you’re building toward, tested here before it’s asked of you at scale.

The spec

The brief poses the problem and leaves room for a response. The spec is the fixed part: what a marker checks. Some lines can be checked mechanically; the rest call for judgement.

How it is marked

Marked on the range and specificity of what you noticed, not on volume --- eight well-argued entries from genuinely different domains outperform twenty samey ones. Each entry needs the omission named precisely enough that another reader could go find it, plus one to three sentences on what it cost and what it bought. An entry that only asserts a cut without pointing at a specific, checkable instance of it will be marked down.