There are four sets of exercises: in paragraphing, the control of sentence length, and the use of commas (two sets).
Exercise 1: paragraphing
Exercise 2: sentence length
Each of these sentences is too long. Typically, the author has tried to cram too many related ideas into the sentence. In each exercise, identify these ideas, and decide where and how you'd split up the sentence for easier reading.
QUESTION A: However, ardent debate between political factions known as the Federalists and anti-Federalists ensued over the balance between strengthening the nation's government and weakening the rights of the people who 10 years earlier had explicitly rebelled against the perceived tyranny of George III of England.
QUESTION B: The need for a stronger central government with a unified currency and the ability to conduct the affairs of state, such as foreign policy (and that could bind all of the states under negotiated treaties and agreements rather than be undermined by a single state's refusal to agree to an international treaty) led to the stronger federal government that was negotiated at the Convention.
We might choose to isolate the following sequence of ideas in this sentence, although there are several other ways of locating the boundaries that would be just as useful in disentangling this complex web:
The need for a stronger central government with a unified currency and the ability to conduct the affairs of state, such as foreign policy (and that could bind all of the states under negotiated treaties and agreements rather than be undermined by a single state's refusal to agree to an international treaty) led to the stronger federal government that was negotiated at the Convention.
Each of these ideas could form a single sentence; since the middle two run are particularly close, we could separate them by a semicolon rather than a full-stop. We'll need to carefully change the grammar so that each sentence—including the two segments either side of the semicolon—is a stand-alone sentence. The four ideas are coloured as above, and the extra bits that we've added—either through simple deduction from the context (e.g., "the delegates identified") or to make them fit together grammatically (e.g., "In particular" and "This", which both link to the previous clause)—are in black.
The delegates identified the need for a stronger central government with a unified currency and the ability to conduct the affairs of state. In particular, they saw federal control of foreign policy as a way of binding all of the states under negotiated treaties and agreements; until then, foreign policy had frequently been undermined by a single state's refusal to agree to an international treaty. This led to the negotiation of a stronger federal government at the Convention.
We started with one sentence of 64 words. We've transformed this into three sentences (four if you count the semicolon in the middle), that is slightly longer in total: 77 words: 23 + 23 + 18 + 13. The new structure is much easier to read, even though it's longer.