[SaintessHeart]

Originally Posted by TinyRedLeaf

Nope, there's no short cut. I edit, on average, about 12 stories a night, each an average of 500 words in length. That's about 6,000 words a night and, on some nights, around 50 per cent more.

That is, about 9,000 words a night, which is roughly the length of one chapter of a typical novel. So, as you can imagine, my brain is pretty much mush by the end of an eight- or nine-hour shift.

There are books that can teach you how to write clean, concise prose. The most accessible one is The Elements of Style by Strunk and White.

Or, you can follow George Orwell's six elementary rules:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.

3. If it is possible to cut out a word, always cut it out.

4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.

5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Rule 4 might need a bit of explaining. A sentence written in the "active" voice uses a simple subject-verb-object structure. Examples: "I go to the zoo."; "Tom picks up the book."; "Jane met Tom."

A sentence written in the "passive" voice uses to a "object-verb-subject" structure. It is typically longer and sounds awkward. Examples: "The book was picked up by Tom."; "Tom was met by Jane."

Civil servants and officials, especially, love to use the passive voice, because it allows them to drop the subject of the sentence. Example: "The goal was met (by whom? how?)."

That creates ambiguity, and also leads to long, horrible sentences.

I read about Orwell's tenets, however I find that applying Rule No. 2 & 3 results in a disaster : ignoring errors make the entire paragraph read funnily. The reason is that get stuff like this :

Generally most of the students find the bookshop and the cafeteria not up to the standard as 47.4% rate the bookshop “poor” and 34.2% rate the same thing for the cafeteria. However there is still a high percentage of respondents (42.1%) who feel satisfied and rate “good” for the current bookshop. The cafeteria’s rating spreads quite evenly among the ratings. Besides “poor” rating from 34.2 %, there are 28.9% rate “good” and 26.3% rate unacceptable at the same time. The cafeteria does not receive a very positive feedback due to the fact that the range of food catered at the cafeteria is quite limited and not so tasty according to the majority of the students. A lot of people feedback that the cafeteria at the other campus is significantly better. Additionally, 10.5 % rate the cafeteria “excellent” still.

Which I split and cut to :

A visible percentage of the students find the bookshop unsatisfactory as it was rated poor by 47.4% of the respondents. On the contrary, there still an equally high percentage of respondents (42.1%) who are satisfied with the bookshop and rated it “good”.

The cafeteria’s general opinion is inconclusive judging from the data garnered from the ratings. It has a 10.5% rating of “excellent”, 28.9% rating of “good”, 34.2 % rating of “poor” and 26.3% rating of “unacceptable”. The cafeteria did not receive a overall positive feedback (60.5% rated “poor” and “unacceptable”) due to the food being “limited” and “unappetising”, according to the written opinions from the survey. It has also been noted that a number of students compared the campus's cafeteria with that of another, possibly suggesting the former being remodeled to be like the latter.

In the end, I end up writing more and making some mistakes which I can't correct without rewriting the entire section from scratch. And that isn't all, I still have 2 more drafts to go, and each is about 1,500 words. And my editing gets more and more slipshod towards the end of the entire report that I almost end up ignoring a whole bunch of individual sentences chunked together at the end.

Is there a proper guideline to writing those readable reports that major government agencies release from time to time? The things I read from the net usually give me stuff that gave my group members the report writing structures.