We do a fair amount of re-writing around here. Each draft of a script sent to a client contains about 260 words, but they often grow to 500 or more words as they pass through various hands in the client’s organization. Very often, we get back a “red-lined” MS Word document. Which can be depressing when it’s all red. But you can’t take it personally. I just take a deep breath and do this:
Usually the additions are on the order of “we can’t not tell them this” — and we find a way to deal with it, most often by trying to put the idea across visually.
But, sometimes people seem uncomfortable when the prose isn’t windy enough. Here’s a client’s suggested rewrite of “humans cannot deal with this”:
Humans are challenged to comprehend the broad-based information analysis requirements implied by this example.
This put me in remind of a passage from George Orwell’s famous 1946 essay, “Politics and the English Language:”
Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes:
I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
Here it is in modern English:
Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.
Orwell’s argument is that political language is usually trying to hide something. In the case of the”broad-based information analysis requirements” the re-writer was probably just trying for precision, but it still sounds pretty funny if you say it out loud 