diff --git a/CONTRIBUTING.md b/CONTRIBUTING.md
index 27d0909..1079ef2 100644
--- a/CONTRIBUTING.md
+++ b/CONTRIBUTING.md
@@ -20,7 +20,7 @@ To ensure a smooth workflow for all contributors, the following general procedur
     * Be sure to include a relevant change log entry in the Pending section of CHANGELOG.md (see file for log format)
         * If the change is breaking, we may add migration instructions.
 
-Note that for very small or clear problems (such as typos), or well isolated improvements, it is not required to an open issue to submit a PR.
+Note that for very small or clear problems (such as typos), or well isolated improvements, it is not required to open an issue to submit a PR.
 But be aware that for more complex problems/features touching multiple parts of the codebase, if a PR is opened before an adequate design discussion has taken place in a github issue, that PR runs a larger likelihood of being rejected.
 
 Looking for a good place to start contributing? How about checking out some good first issues
@@ -65,4 +65,4 @@ and either refer to the relevant section of a paper or include a short proof/arg
 All performance improvements should be accompanied with benchmarks improving, or otherwise have it be clear that things have improved.
 For some areas of the codebase, performance roughly follows the number of field multiplications, but there are also many areas where
 hard to predict low level system effects such as cache locality and superscalar operations become important for performance.
-Thus performance can often become very non-intuitive / diverge from minimizing the number of arithmetic operations.
\ No newline at end of file
+Thus performance can often become very non-intuitive / diverge from minimizing the number of arithmetic operations.