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 Goal

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

Concision Example

Less Concise

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

More Concise

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

Comments on Response Options

Problem Text

Our client requested that our system include more functions that would upgrade it. We managed to accomplish adding these new use cases, despite previous concerns about the ways in which we can meet our deadline and to handle code defects discovered earlier.

Option A

“add these use cases, despite previous concerns about meeting our deadline”

This option cuts out the most implied information such as “accomplish” and “the ways in which we can” and “our.”

Option B

“add these new use cases to the system, despite previous concerns about our ability to meet our deadline”

Like the option above, this cuts out implied information such as “accomplish,” but it adds “our ability to,” which may be implied for some audiences. But because adding this emphasizes the effort in meeting the deadline, this option might work well if your purpose is to emphasize this.

Option C

“add these new use cases despite the fact there were previous concerns about our ability to meet our deadline”

Like both options above, this cuts out “accomplish” which is implied, but it also adds implied information such as “the fact there were.” Like the option above, it adds “our ability to,” which aims to emphasize the effort in meeting the deadline, so this part of the option would work well if your purpose is to emphasize this effort.