Annual report writing, Plain English Editing and Copywriting

Annual Report Editing: How to Strip Out the Unnecessary Words

Posted on by Andrew Pegler
plain english writing

We had a long, supa busy annual report season, so I’ve been away from LinkedIn, deep in the plain-English trenches. But I’ve emerged with some things to share, which I’ll drip-feed over the next little while. I wanted to start small: what I call the grit between the bricks. The unnecessary words in a sentence.

Here’s my scoring system:
–One word removed = single
–Two words = double
–Three words = triple
–Four words = over the fence for six—job done, go to lunch

Remove these from across an 80pp annual report and it’s significant.
Featured are examples from client drafted annual report copy we plain-Englished. Tighter, but not lighter.

What’s your favourite piece of grit to remove? Drop it in the comments. I’d love to see what drives you up the wall.

Andrew Pegler

Andrew is Principal of Andrew Pegler Media Pty Ltd (APM) and an award-winning plain English editor, writer, and trainer. He has delivered workshops across Australia and Asia since 2002 and has judged major plain English awards in New Zealand and Australia. Andrew leads APM’s business writing and plain English training teams and has helped craft over 160 annual reports. He believes, like Albert Einstein, that “everything should be made as simple as possible, but not one bit simpler.”