Reality Lab · 12 MIN · Judge

Repair a confident draft

A model wrote a fluent paragraph. Some of it isn't in the source. Find what it invented and fix it.

THE SITUATION

You asked an assistant to summarise one short source note into a paragraph for a newsletter. It came back polished and confident. Your job is not to admire it — it's to check it against the only thing it was given.

Your task: Mark every claim the source doesn't support, then rewrite the paragraph so it says only what you can stand behind.

THE SOURCE NOTE YOU PROVIDED

SOURCE NOTE:
Our library ran a coding club for teenagers on Saturday mornings this spring. Attendance grew over the term. Several parents told us their teens now help younger siblings with homework.

— — —

THE DRAFT IT PRODUCED:
Our wildly popular coding club became the #1 youth program in the county this spring, with attendance soaring 300% to over 200 teenagers every Saturday. A university study found that 9 in 10 participants improved their school grades, and the club has been credited with reducing local youth crime.

YOUR WORKSPACEIn the box below (local to your browser — nothing is sent anywhere), rewrite the draft so every sentence is supported by the source note. Where the source doesn't say, either cut the claim or mark it as needing a real source.

This box is local to your browser. Nothing you type is sent anywhere or saved after you leave.

Check your own work

There's no grade here — checking against these is the exercise. Compare each point to what you wrote.

Every number in your version appears in the source.The source gives no figures at all — '300%', '200', '9 in 10' were invented. Specific numbers are the easiest hallucination to miss because they look authoritative.
No claim of a study, ranking, or external credit remains unsupported.'A university study', '#1 in the county', 'reducing youth crime' are fabricated attributions — the most damaging kind, because they borrow someone else's authority.
Superlatives you can't back up are gone.'Wildly popular', 'soaring' are the model's tone, not the source's content. Fluent enthusiasm reads as fact.
What the source does support is kept.The club ran Saturday mornings, attendance grew, and parents reported siblings being helped — those are real and worth saying plainly.

Reveal a worked approach

A defensible rewrite: "This spring our library ran a Saturday-morning coding club for teenagers. Attendance grew over the term, and several parents told us their teens now help younger siblings with homework."

That's it — shorter, quieter, and entirely supported. If the newsletter needs the bigger claims, the fix isn't better wording; it's going and getting real attendance figures and real parent quotes.

The tell across the whole exercise: the invented sentences were the most impressive ones. Fluency and confidence are exactly where unsupported claims hide.

LANDMARKS

CONCEPTS