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 parallelism, coherence, and concision.

Challenge 1: Being Concise

Your Goals

1. connecting old and new information in a seamless manner

2. making related parts of a text consistent

3. cutting out unnecessary (already-known, repeated or implied) information

Concision Example

More Concise

The goal in having students complete this activity is to show them how concision has the potential to make communication more effective.

Less Concise

The purpose of this activity is to show how concision can make communication more effective.

Comments on Response Options

Problem Text

We want our client to understand that [all of the important and critical use cases have been implemented, and that the major issues that have risen have been addressed. Major issues have been documented and we have discussed them as well.] Most of these issues were caused by assumptions made during the early stages of the project.

Option A

“all critical use cases have been implemented, and major issues have been addressed, documented, and discussed.”

This option directly connects the implementation of use cases with the approaches to issues. It uses parallel concepts to describe these approaches: “addressed,” “documented,”and “discussed.”

Option B

“every single critical use case has been implemented and major issues have been addressed, documented, and discussed.”

Like the first option, this directly connects the implementation of use cases with the approaches to issues, and uses parallel concepts to describe these approaches. But, it is a little less concise because it adds “every single.” Using “every single,” though, emphasizes that all of the critical use cases have been issued; therefore, this option would work well if your purpose is to emphasize this.

Option C

“all important and critical use cases have been implemented. Major issues have been addressed, and we have been documenting and are discussing them.”

This makes no connection between the implementation of use cases with approaches to issues. Although the concepts, “documenting” and “discussing” are parallel, they are not parallel with “addressed.” Also, “we” and “are” are implied and therefore unnecessary.