Text A: an original contemporary practice extract.

At the end of each shoreline clean-up, I wrote the number of bags collected beside every volunteer’s name. The total was easy to understand, and I displayed it proudly at our meetings. One morning, Dev returned with only half a bag. I nearly placed him at the bottom of the list until I saw the stretch of path he had cleared. He had spent hours separating lengths of tangled wire from stones and carrying them away safely.

For the next clean-up, I recorded the areas made safe and the difficult items removed as well as the number of bags filled. The bag total still showed how much ordinary litter we had collected, but it no longer stood for the whole contribution. Our record became slightly harder to summarise and much fairer to the work people had actually done.

Text B: an original contemporary practice extract.

I supervised a project that converted handwritten documents into digital copies. Our weekly report ranked volunteers by the number of pages they scanned. This seemed objective until I worked beside Lina. Her total rose slowly because she unfolded fragile pages, checked every image and repeated any scan that made the writing unclear. Other volunteers produced more pages, but several of their images had to be completed again.

I changed the report so that it included preparation, accuracy checks and work that needed correcting. We continued to count pages because the project still required steady progress. However, the largest number was no longer automatically treated as the best performance. Measuring more than speed gave us a clearer account of who was helping the project move forward.