Tighten This! Challenge Sentence 32 [writing/editing game]

this-weeks-challenge-question-marcia-riefer-johnston Welcome to the concise-writing game, Tighten This! Here’s Challenge Sentence 32. This one is pure play; it was written to poke fun at overblown sentences. (I’ll reveal the source next week. Thanks to Ray for discovering this one.)

To promote the successful completion of our customary mid-diurnal paradigm regarding the procurement of necessary nutritional supplementation and the advancement of the contemporaneous, spontaneous, and coterminous interdialoguing of affiliated human-services assets, the present contingent should initiate both direct and lateral movements as appropriate to minimize and at the end of the day eliminate the physical separation between the target population and the aliment-preparation and -dispensation facilities.

Your revision: _______________________
[Scroll to the bottom and put your revision in a comment by Friday, Jan. 29.]

Tips:

How and Why to Play—even though it’s impossible
Write Tight(er): Get to the Point and Save Millions

Last Week’s Challenge Sentence

In case you’re playing this game for the first time (welcome!), or in case you’ve had other things on your mind since you read the previous Challenge Sentence, here it is again:

Perform a thorough feature assessment and extensive testing of the operating system.

Read on to hear thoughts from the game’s three judges: Larry Kunz (a seasoned technical writer and blogger who has participated in this game from the beginning), Ray (my husband), and me.

Larry’s Pick (Larry Kunz speaking)

Who needs adjectives? Our Tighten This! players don’t, from the look of it. Most of you excised thorough and extensive from the original sentence, and I applaud you. It’s a cardinal rule of technical writing: scrutinize your modifiers (adjectives and adverbs) and strike out those that don’t carry their weight.

In this case, thorough and extensive are supremely strikeable. When the boss says “perform a feature assessment,” what kind of feature assessment do you think she expects? A cursory one? Not likely. Same for “test the system.” Unless the boss wants a half-hearted assessment or a slapdash test, I think thorough and extensive go without saying.

I liked Kimberly’s and Rhonda’s sentences best, and they’re nearly identical. The only difference is Kimberly’s operating system versus Rhonda’s operating system’s features. So it comes down to whether we need features. Again, let’s ask if it carries it weight. As with thorough and extensive, I don’t think it does. If not its features, what aspect of the operating system would we assess? Its ability to play the oboe?

So Kimberly is my winner, by the thinnest of margins, with congratulations to everyone for a job well done.

Kimberly’s entry:

Assess and test the operating system.

word count spreadsheet

How did Marcia arrive at the translation formula in the spreadsheet above? See “Write Tight(er): Get to the Point and Save Millions.”

Ray’s Pick (Ray Johnston speaking)

This class doesn’t exist, but many of our colleagues have taken it:

VERBOSITY 301

Day 1: Useless verbs

perform

…

Day 2: Useless adjectives and adverbs

thorough

extensive

…

Never say

Test the operating system.

when you can say

Perform a thorough feature assessment and extensively test the operating system.

Feature assessment? Really?

Who scores this week? I have to slice the prize pie into ~~four~~ five pieces.

Deborah: with a nice kick-off.
Sharon: for losing feature assessment.
Kimberly: who slides everything into assess and test.
Nick: whose OS removes syllables.
Marc: …

Marcia’s Pick (Marcia Johnston speaking)

Last week’s sentence suffers from overnounification (technically, nominalization, but I prefer the extra syllable). The remedy? Drag assess and test out of assessment and testing. Almost all of you did that. Some of you simply used test, which could make sense if assessing is part of testing. Rather than repeat the word-count winner from Larry’s analysis, I’ll close with huzzahs all around. Thanks to all who played.

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