Lexis Lesson · What a Revisions Log Hides

01

Warm-up · 4 min

Square footage changed

Read the first log entry out loud. Then answer in one sentence: which square footage, and by how much?

02

Input & Noticing · 14 min

The revisions log, in full

Verbatim from your own Silverwood Drive set.

Silverwood Dr. — revisions

Delta	Date	Description
1	12/14/2023	Square Footage Changed
2	02/16/2024	Internal Revisions
3	08/01/2025	New pages added

Twenty months, three lines, eleven words. Now count what entry 1 does not tell you:

Which square footage — impervious surface, lot coverage, paver area?
From what, to what. The entry is compatible with 10 SF and with 1,754.
Who asked. A plan checker, the client, or you finding your own error?
Which sheets moved. A square-footage change propagates — table, plan, notes.
Whether it was a correction or a redesign. Those are different events with different consequences, and the log flattens them into the same four words.

And entry 2 is worse. Internal Revisions means “we changed something nobody asked us to change.” It is honest, it is standard practice, and it tells a future reader nothing at all — including you, eighteen months later, trying to remember why the wall moved.

The log is not badly written. It is written to a convention, and the convention is terse on purpose: it lives in a title block two inches wide. The problem is that the response letter gets written from the log, and a terse log makes a vague letter.

Teacher note Push on entry 1 until she connects it to Unit 7. The square footage that changed on this project is the impervious-surface figure she spent Unit 7 arguing from — 2,963 SF existing, 1,209 SF proposed. When she makes that link, the point of the unit lands: the log entry is the same fact as the compliance memo, compressed to the point of uselessness.

03

Focus on Form · 10 min

Two registers, one fact

The log and the letter

	Revisions log	Response letter
Form	Noun phrase, no verb, no subject	Full sentence, passive, present perfect
Example	Square Footage Changed	The impervious surface table has been revised.
Date	In its own column	Only if the date matters to the argument
Reader	Anyone holding the sheet, at any point in the future	One reviewer, this week, who asked a specific question
Job	Prove that a change happened, and when	Prove that this change answers that comment

This is the nominalisation from Unit 5, doing a different job. There, the nominal register was the scope statement — Paver installation. SOD installation. — and the risk was letting it leak into the client email. Here it is the log, and the risk is identical: a response letter written in log register (“Square footage revised. Turf itemised. Wall relocated.”) reads as though you are filing paperwork rather than answering a person.

Expanding a log entry into a letter sentence is not decoration. It is where you supply the four things the log dropped.

04

Controlled Practice · 14 min

Read the log closely

Word Formation · B2+

Complete each sentence with the correct form of the word in brackets.

The set was reissued for on 14 December 2023. REVISE
The reviewer has requested a full rather than an over-the-counter correction. SUBMIT
Each change is with a numbered delta. MARK
The rear wall has been to clear the setback. LOCATE
The log gives no of what actually changed. EXPLAIN
Three sheets were affected by the revised . CALCULATE

Teacher note Resubmittal is the hard one and it is worth the time — it is US construction usage, it is what the process is actually called, and resubmission will be her first instinct. Both exist; only one appears on a California correction list.

05

Communicative Task · 10 min

Expand the log

Task card

Your three log entries, and a reviewer who was not there

Turn each entry into the sentence you would put in a response letter.

Supply what the log dropped: which figure, from what to what, and where it now appears.
One sentence each. If you need two, the log hid more than you thought.
For entry 2 — Internal Revisions — you may have to admit you cannot reconstruct it. Say that out loud.

Teacher note The admission on entry 2 is the valuable moment, not a failure. A designer who notices that her own log has cost her the ability to explain her own drawing will start writing better entries the same week.

06

Feedback · 4 min

What would you write now?

If you were logging that first revision again today, what would the entry say? Remember it has to fit a title block — so the constraint is real, and the question is which four words are worth the space.

07

Wrap-up · 4 min

Before the next lesson

Homework. Find every revision cloud on the Silverwood set and pair it with its log entry. Bring one change you can describe precisely, and one you cannot.