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MORE ADVICE ON BEING CONCISE

1. Use active voice

2. Use phrases or even adjectives in front of nouns instead of adjective clauses
e.g. ‘arrangements which assigned main responsibility to the national PMO’ becomes
‘arrangements assigning main responsibility’
3. use adjectives with a comma, not ‘and’ in front e.g. ‘close and proactive supervision’
becomes ‘close, proactive supervision’
4. avoid prepositional phrases, particularly those showing possession, working as adjectives or
working as an adverb to describe an action e.g. ‘by the task team with strong technical expertise
and global knowledge’ becomes ‘by the globally, technically expert task team’ and ‘Difficulties
with project implementation’ becomes ‘implementation difficulties’
5. remove synonymous adjectives
6. remove synonymous nouns e.g. expertise, knowledge
7. remove any adjectives with nouns that say the same thing e.g. mandatory requirement- just
choose one
8. use a verb rather than an noun phrase- e.g. cooperate not joint effort
9. remove any adjectives or nouns that are known to the reader e.g. if you are talking about a
project, you do not need to mention project when you talk about different aspects like scope
because I know you are talking about the project’s scope. Just write ‘scope’
10. use more specific adjectives to avoid adverbs e.g. ‘The food was terrible’ not ‘The food was
very bad.’
11. remove any unnecessary adverbs or adjectives e.g. instead of ‘whether they actually adopted’
use ‘whether they adopted’; rather than ‘access sufficient information’ simply ‘access
information’; not ‘in the three cities respectively’ but ‘in the three cities’