How often must we hear the mantra of value in real estate? Location, location, location.
Maybe not as often as we should hear the mantra of clarity in writing: Precision, precision, precision.
Consider this example: "The Louisville police department released a letter of termination it sent to the officer who 'blindly fired' 10 rounds into a covered patio door."
Written that way, the sentence would have us believe that the patio door was covered.
We get the true meaning if the sentence is written this way: "The Louisville police department released a letter of termination it sent to the officer who 'blindly fired' into the door of a covered patio."
The impulse to compress ideas often leads to constructions that befuddle a reader.
Another example: A mask mandate exemption for people of color meant to address racial profiling concerns has been removed after racist backlash, Oregon county officials said.
That sentence begins with three nouns stacked — mask, mandate and exemption — forcing a reader to work to unstack them.