The following section presents excerpts from an Executive Summary of a Final Technical Report on a new conference registration system created by a software development team in Qatar. The developers believe that the innovative features of their new system make it superior to its competitors. However, their clients (the Qatar National Convention Center) did not find the Executive Summary and Report convincing enough. In the challenges that follow, try to consider the options presented so that the developers can make the most effective case for their audience.

Directions: Identify and improve text that can make the report more effective, in terms of its coherence, concision, and correctness.

Challenge 6: Combining Coherence Concision Correctness

Your Goals

1. connecting old and new information in a seamless manner

2. cutting outunnecessary (already-known, implied or repeated) information

3. using punctuation to break up ideas.

Comments on Response Options

Problem Text

Our system hopes to satisfy clients with features including: a quick processing of applications, a quick processing of registration forms, and access to different multiple users. It gives access to users from multiple locations.

Option A

“Our system hopes to satisfy clients with features such as quick processing of applications and registration forms, and access to multiple users from multiple locations.“

This option is effective in connecting and highlighting the advantages of having multiple users and multiple locations. This option also cuts out the largest amount of extra information and uses the two concepts of “processing” and “access” in parallel.

Option B

“Our system hopes to satisfy clients with features including: a quick processing of applications and registration forms, and access to multiple users who may all be working from different locations.”

This connects the advantages of having multiple users and multiple locations. This option, however, has extra information such as “who may all be working.” It also adds a colon after the word “include” which is not needed since “include” itself signals an upcoming series. Although this is not the most concise option, it may work for an audience who is less familiar with this feature involving multiple locations.

Option C

“Our system hopes to satisfy clients with these features that include a quick processing of applications and processing of registration forms, as well as access to multiple users. Users from multiple locations can access the system.”

This option does not connect the advantages of having multiple users and multiple locations. It also adds extra information such as “processing of,” and “can access the system.” This option also adds a comma after the word “include. “Include” signals an upcoming series, but the comma does not, so the comma takes away from the purpose of the word include, and is not necessary.