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 Gobbledygook - When we overwrite with gobbledygook, we confuse our readers. When we overstate with brash pronouncements, we alienate our readers. We should avoid these practices and instead, write clearly and calmly. Suggestion: Rewrite all gobbledygook. [ gobbledygook: wordy and often unintelligible jargon ] 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. This is the language of the bureaucrat. Avoid it! Life is too short to spend valuable time writing or reading such overblown prose. Be kind to your reader and say things simply: Each tow is a collection of barges, as many as 50, lashed in a square.

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