Exercise 5: cut
You will be given a 300-word article in lectures. Iteratively reduce the article by 30 words. Iterate seven times, producing seven new versions of the article of length 270, 240, 210, 180, 150, 120, and 90 words. In each case the word count should be within 7 words of the target. Your aim, at each step, is to preserve the information content of the piece but not necessarily the original wording. It is common for the piece to improve in the early iterations and then to become more cryptic and incomplete in the later iterations.
I have written an example (88kB PDF) that demonstrates this exercise. I have used Microsoft Word's reviewing facility to show you exactly which words have been removed and which added on each iteration; you do not need to do this for your submission.