Style

Mississippi

Suggest improvements for the highlighted problem area: From St. Louis to Baton Rouge, the Mississippi is a tree-lined, muddy-banked river with football-field-shaped boats called tows. Each tow has origination in individual barges, with an interface implementation competency of 50, the bottom line being a lashing procedure empowering a parallelepiped paradigm. Up to 500 railway freight cars can be transported in one tow. And each incredibly awesome tow is pushed from behind by a disgusting square-bowed towboat. Life on a towboat can be a little hard. A crew of 10 often spends 30 days on the river, seldom sleeping more than 5 hours in a day. It is rather important that they are very watchful when navigating the channel, being pretty alert for shifting sand bars. Answer: - Style: Avoid Long, Stacked Adjectives - Our opening paragraphs include several examples of adjectives that can confuse our readers. The grammar may be correct, but the style makes it difficult to follow. Suggestion: Rewrite any sentence that has multiple nouns stacked up as adjectives. From St. Louis to Baton Rouge, the Mississippi is a tree-lined, muddy-banked river with football-field-sized boats called tows. Reading such a sentence is like trying to run across a field that has patches of deep tar. But a smooth passage is possible with a simple rewrite: From St. Louis to Baton Rouge, the Mississippi is a tree-lined river of muddy banks and square boats called tows.

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