How to improve your writing – 2

This the second of my occasional posts on writing simply and clearly, and here we consider how to tidy up a piece of text once you’ve got something written down. Examples are drawn from How to improve your writing 1 – the first part of this two-parter.

Work out what your verbal tics are, and edit your text to remove them

Make this a habit.   Here are some examples:

1. Remove all adverbs and adjectives and see what is left

Adverbs and adjectives are words that describe or qualify other words (the red balloon burst loudly). The following text won a Golden Bull in 2008 from the Plain English campaign:

‘Our goal at Balfour Beatty is to deliver consistent, long-term growth to our shareholders ... By becoming the partner of choice tosophisticated owners in our chosen disciplines and geographies, we believe we will achieve secure, industry best margins in ourcontracting activities and substantial, sustainable equity returns from our long-term investment portfolio.’

As you can see, this isn’t much better but it has helped us work out if the text contained anything of substance and how to re-organise it.

Our goal is to deliver long term growth to our shareholders, and we believe we’ll achieve this by becoming the partner of owners in our disciplines and geographies.

Sometimes, when you do this you’ll discover that what you’ve written goes round in circles.  If it does, cut it out.

2. Turn the passive voice into the active voice.

Making up an example was quicker than finding one.  The passive voice is considered to be particularly bad in process documentation because it is easy to forget about an actor who is never mentioned.

This becomes:

I found it quicker to make up an example than find one.  I particularly dislike it when a writer or analyst uses the passive voice in process documentation (the mat is sat upon) because I have no idea who is doing the sitting (the cat, presumably).

3. Look out for and eliminate any personal tics you may have.

I have a fondness for -ing verbs.  Here are some that I’ve cut out from an earlier version of this post:

This is about getting across information or ideas  …  anything which is just expanding or supporting the main points … the most important point you are making …  preparing our audience with subsidiary points and building up to a conclusion …

You have already seen how I got rid of those.

Don’t worry that you’ll  squeeze all the character out of your writing because you won’t: it is more important to be clear than quirky and you can be quirky and clear at the same time.

Have fun.

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Friday Faces

A little bit of odd fun on a Friday, courtesy of  St Andrews University – upload a picture of your smiling face and have a play.

West Asian Mona Lisa

East Asian Mona Lisa

Black Mona Lisa

Mucha Lisa

Mona by Botticelli

Modigliani Lisa

Manga Lisa

Manly Lisa in Drag

Hominid Lisa

Scary Baby Lisa

Mona Lisa Child

Moaning Lisa as a Teen

Old Lady Mona

Moaning Drunk

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Did Web 2.0 bankrupt Iceland?

Not by itself, no.  But Web 2.0, in particular the data-mashups on the comparison websites, the blogosphere and the consumer discussion boards, made the banking crisis broader and deeper than it would otherwise have been.  Or so I have just concluded, though I’ve not heard anyone else saying this.

‘How so?’ you ask.

Every now and again you come across a piece of research so startling that you have to get up at 6 in the morning and blog about it.  OK, I appreciate it is slightly odd to be reading a Deutsche Bank Research paper in bed at 05:45 am but I find I study best in the mornings, ok?

So here it is.

In 3 years the percentage of people who shopped around for financial products went up from 15% to 55%.

Consumer Empowerment 2002-2005

This is good, yes?  We get better value for money and it’s an end to the miss-selling scandals of the 1980s and 1990s.  The consumer wins and Martin Lewis rules, right?

Right?

Ri-ight.  And I certainly do use comparison web-sites to shop around for financial services and utilities. But…

But presumably if you flip this around it means that during the middle three years of this decade the banks found they could no longer rely on inertia to sell 85% of their products for them.  And that, my chickadees, is an astonishing upheaval.  And I believe that the graph above  goes a long way towards telling us why the credit crunch (the consequences of which will outlast the lifespan of my pension) was so deep and so disturbingly global.

You see, this swing in consumer habits is astonishing. It is a tectonic shift in the financial services industry in its own right.  It’s huge.  And it tells us a lot about the pressures that the retail banks were under during the period leading up to the crisis last  year to create comparison-site winners.  No bloody wonder that when Northern Rock created that pernicous 125% mortgage the Coventry and HBOS followed suit.  They had to, or lose business.  And no wonder that a niche and specialist product – the self certified mortgage – ended up comprising almost half the mortgage market. The market over-heated when information became friction-free, the regulators didn’t stop the bankers and the bankers couldn’t stop themselves.

I won’t say that Martin Lewis made them do it, but I will say that bad business drives out good.  Putting it simply, the banks cut margins to the point where they couldn’t afford the products they sold us.   The chart above just puts numbers on the pressures they were under: in 2002 a bank or insurance company could, it seems, rely on 85% of its customers not to shop around for the best deal.  So it was relatively easy for it to sell us sustainable products that were not artificially competitive. And, yes, it could also miss-sell us inappropriate products; the force has a light side and a dark side after all.  But in three short years, by 2005, it seems that only 45% of it’s customers would buy the first product they’re offered.  As I said, I would love to know what that figure is now.

For a while, this unsustainable business put artificial pressure on the sustainable businesses. Look at the period from 2003 to 2006 in the chart below.  HBOS’s lending products were super-competitive, it was increasingly successful, and it left Lloyds TSB standing. But as we can see, early in 2007 the chickens tumbled home to roost.

LLoyds vs HBOS share movements 2002-2009

(Unfortunately the Telegraph’s excellent free charting service does not let me plot a specific stock against its sector but HBOS tracked the sector and Lloyds didn’t).

And Iceland? Could Iceland’s banks have grown their foreign business in the way that’s charted below without individuals and organisations overseas shopping around on-line?

Growth of Icelandic Financial Services 2001-2008

I don’t know the answer to that question. It could be co-incidence; I have to admit that the paper I got the chart from argues against interventionism, but I needed to reference Iceland again to justify a cheap headline.  However, the chart above indicates that Iceland’s foreign assets and liabilities appear to have gone up six- or eight-fold between 2002 and 2005, and it seems implausible to me that Iceland could have got so much consumer business in that time without consumers responding to online reviews and advertising.

So – is this yet another case of my only love springing from my only hate?

Web 2.0 is immensely liberating.  It is amazing that we have so much access to so much competitive information.  It is great for us as individuals that we can protect ourselves from being ripped off by banks and utilities.  But there’s no two ways about it – Web 2.0 changed consumers’ financial services buying patterns in a way that amplified the competitive pressures on the retail banks, and that is the untold story of the credit crunch.

As my grandmother used to warn me: too much ice-cream is bad for you.

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References:

Philip Bagus and David Howden (2009)
Iceland’s Banking Crisis: The Meltdown of an Interventionist Financial System

Stefan Heng, Thomas Meyer, Antje Stobbe (2007)
Implications of Web 2.0 for Financial Institutions: Be a Driver, Not a Passenger

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For your listening pleasure

iCat

Weekly podcasts – listen while you cook, drive, clean or run. These are stayers – regularly broadcasting and regularly worth listening to.   These are all made as podcasts and not radio programmes, with just one exception.

Funnies

The Bugle – Andy Zaltzman and John Oliver riff irreverently off the week’s news and each other. Childish, intelligent, infectious. A weekly must.
Web
iTunes

Answer me this - My but those Zaltzmen are clever.  And funny. Andy’s sister Helen (barely employed arts graduate), Olly Mann (hopeful weblebrity) and Helen’s partner Martin (long-haired physicist) chat about listeners’ questions, Ollie’s suspect personal hygiene, films, tv shows and books.
Web
iTunes

Narratives

The Moth – ‘true stories told live on stage without notes’. There isn’t a dud among these; these are the wierd and funny s**t that happens to people, all superbly told. Breathtaking.
Web
iTunes

Escape Pod – a good collection of short(ish) science fiction stories – some of them classics of the genre, all of them appropriately read.
Web
iTunes

History

Norman Centuries – neat 20 minute episodes of enjoyable narrative history from Lars Brownworth who brought us the really excellent 12 Byzantine Rulers.
Web – Web
iTunes – iTunes

The History of Rome - an exceptional podcast covering the 800 year sweep from the wolf to the barbarians; we are currently on episode 70 or so and we’ve recently seen off Nero and are just about to have fun with the Flavians. A joy for the sarcastic asides alone. The man deserves an award.
Web
iTunes

Critical Thinking

Skeptoid – Brian Dunning is getting sharper and more impatient as the months go by, but these 10 minute deconstructions of popular myths are each of them well worth listening to.
Web
iTunes

Point of Inquiry - intelligent but agenda-driven conversations on religion, scepticism and society.  Not to everyone’s taste, but heady stuff if you like it.
Web
iTunes

Conversation

Stuff you should know and The Things you Missed in History Class – endearing conversations on various subject by How Stuff Works staffers. They are sweetly enthusiastic on the topic de semain, and the girls have a breathy intelligence which is rather hot, while the boys are more laid-back and dudey.
Web – Web
iTunes – iTunes

Forum – a world of ideas – This is definitely one that gives the synapses a stretch, but it’s hard to find on the radio, tucked away on the World Service.  If In Our Time aims at graduates, then this aims at post-grads.  Bridget Kendall plays off three or four world-class experts superbly,  usually a scientist and a social scientist and an artist or writer.
Web
iTunes

Business – since this is supposed to be a business-related blog

Lucy Kellaway - 5 minute doses of acerbic comment on working and corporate life from a regular columnist on the FT. I also enjoy Martin Wolf’s economics podcast from the FT: his calm authoritative tone sounds soothing, but what he says frequently scares me witless.
Web – Web
iTunes – iTunes

Business Week – Behind this Week’s Cover Story - 15 minutes of conversation with the writer of each week’s front page story; an easy way to keep an ear out for current topics in the American Business press.
Web
iTunes

I’ll do this again soon and blog about new additions to my iPod: I’ve just discovered iTunes-U and a whole load of new podcasts from newbie podcasters including Richard Wiseman…

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Re-validating the wheel

Crop Circle Swirl (from Wikimedia Commons)

Here’s a bit of fun for a Friday. Somewhere deep in our genetics there’s obviously a need for answers.  I should give that a capital A really.  Somewhere deep in our genetics there’s obviously a need for Answers.

Answers are good: when you know the answer to a question you can move on to the next one.   That’s how progress works, by not reinventing the wheel. Newton stood on the shoulders of giants, and all that.

However, there is a danger in this.  Sure, no-one wants to waste time re-inventing the wheel but we should certainly revisit the blue-prints every now and again.  If we didn’t, we’d still be burning witches because we’d settled for a crude and inaccurate answer to the question of why a single woman might prefer to live by herself.

There’s a sequence of thinking that goes something like this:

We don’t have an explanation for crop circles…

… so we say “it’s a mystery” meaning we haven’t yet found the answer …

… which is an un-answer: it is an unanswered question to ponder or to research or to put on one side until more data is available …

… but people don’t like un-answers,  so they answer the question, saying “it’s a Mystery” (meaning aliens or ley lines or the Ancients) …

… and the question’s been answered and doesn’t need revisiting because it is a done deal …

… but it’s a non-answer which shuts down debate …

… so when we get more knowledge, and it turns out to be two blokes and a plank of wood …

… only some of us say “ah, the mystery is solved” while others say “No, no, no! We knew the answer already.  It’s a Mystery”.

The difference between answers and non-answers is invidious.  They can be hard to tell apart because they both feel like closure.  The wheel’s invented. Nothing to see here. Move along now.  By contrast, un-answered questions itch and scratch and nag and gnaw away at us; and that’s good, that way progress lies.

Many invalid assumptions are based on non-answers masquerading as answers. We have to check that the wheel we are using has an axle in the middle. Questioning those assumptions helps us root out the non-answers. But it is uncomfortable because we then have to live with those itchy, scratchy, nagging, gnawing un-answered questions, and keep them open, keep on asking them, possibly for ever. We have to be willing to live with not knowing all the answers about what Tim Minchin calls ‘this beautiful complex wonderfully unfathomable natural world’.

Ach, he puts it much better than I do, and this is the Friday Fun that I promised you, though I worry about the red wine and the white carpet.

Enjoy:

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Book Review – Throwing Sheep in the Boardroom

Throwing Sheep in the Boardroom

This very readable book has impeccable academic credentials:  Fraser and Dutta are on the faculty at INSEAD but they wear their scholarship lightly. They consider the effects of Web 2.0 on business and society, and their case studies include FaceBook’s patchy relationship with its users and their employers, the destruction of the music business by the internet, and the 2008 US presidential election. It’s comprehensive and accessible and has a superb bibliography, what more can you want?

Occasionally I disagreed with Fraser and Dutta’s arguments.  They use examples from medieval France and the Knights Templar to illustrate the fracturing of hierarchical power structures.  Now colour me cynical, but would they have done that if it weren’t for Dan Brown?

More seriously, they are naive about the height of the barriers of entry to online fame and pin a lot of the first section of the book on the unsupportable assumption that online fame is open to all. They talk breathlessly (well, breathlessly for academics) about Joe Nobody from Nowhere obtaining online fame. But that doesn’t mean it’s replicable: the fact that they cannot see how it happened doesn’t mean that there weren’t reasons for it happening.  I mean, haven’t they read Outliers?  Online fame doesn’t come for wishing as Sandi Thom’s publicists discovered.  Exactly the same astonishment was expressed about the working class rock heros of the 60s, but for every Lennon and McCartney there were …. well there weren’t any other Lennons and McCartneys.  Which is my point.

They are balanced in their reporting of Web 2.0 evangelists and Web 2.0 apostates. This makes a refreshing change.  In fact, they aren’t just balanced on the subject, they delve deeply into why and how corporate and governmental organisations resist Web 2.0.  This is the nub of the book, and no-one else is saying just these things in quite this way.  But even so, they are reluctant to admit that there are some serious Orwellian implications for all our futures.

So I am not sure why I’m not raving about it.  Perhaps because I like books that give me epiphanies.  This one was rich and informative but didn’t shift any of my paradigms. They close their arguments down in a rather authoritarian way, which doesn’t set the brain fizzing with ideas. It may just be that their usual ‘voice’ is  the de-personalised style of academia.  Don’t be dis-heartened by my faint praise: it is much better than I make it sound.

Definitely a must-read, though possibly in paperback, for anyone considering the role of Web 2.0 in any kind of organisation, or who has an interest in the recent history of the internet or in how technology affects individuals and society.   Worth it for the case studies and the bibliography alone – everything else is a bonus.

PS – I thought I’d reviewed Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell – turns out I hadn’t. That’s easily remedied.

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Unexpectedly Delicious

Ok, I’m feeling naive now, because  I hadn’t realised what a great portal Delicious is and how easily it helps you tap into the NetGeist.  I am annoyed with myself about this, because I’ve used Delicious for over a year now.

So – what is Delicious?  It’s a site that makes it easy to manage your bookmarks and favourites so you are never more than a couple of clicks from any link that you might want to go back to.  Suddenly moving from PC to PC doesn’t matter because your bookmarks are always there, even if you are a hot desker at by day or an internet cafe user by night or just a browser tart like me.

What’s new for me is just how good Delicious is as a portal into the web. For the last 18 months or so my start page has been Google News, so no wonder my surfing’s been dreary:  I’ve read more of the Daily Mail than is good for anyone.  (How do they get to be the main link for a story so often?)  Delicious is a much cooler way to tap into the NetGeist.  My favourite Favourite is Fresh Bookmarks, but there are others.  Fresh Bookmarks shows you what’s been bookmarked recently and by how many people.  And this is part of the power of Delicious:  it’s an automatic ranking system based on self-interest rather than altruism, so it works.

You use tags to sort out your bookmarks, and the collective tagging within Delicious forms what is sometimes called a Folksonomy.  For a while I found it hard to find links which had been tagged using the tags I use for my own bookmarks, but in fact that’s easily done using the Subscriptions feature, which gives you more control than an automated feature would.

The other thing that I hadn’t realised is how easy it is to discover who’s got a specific page or site bookmarked, like this blog for instance. (And a special Shout Out to Simon, here.  Hey! Simon! I said it was cool!).  I keep track of myself on Google and Technorati of course, and I’ve found at least 4 other Ben Warsops on Facebook, but it hadn’t occurred to me that anyone thinks I’m Delicious.

I do give myself credit for realising that Delicous lets other people take a look at what you’ve bookmarked.  Feel free to take a look at my bookmarks: you’ll find them rather serious, because I mark recipes and shoes and pages about SatNavs private, but that’s because my account is in my own name.

In summary: Delicious - so much cooler than I thought.

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Make your passwords memorable but secure

This is apparently National ID Fraud Prevention Week, so my name is Bill Bartmann and welcome to my blog.

This is timely.  The recent publication of email passwords online has set many people busily changing passwords. But how often do we create passwords like October09 or BenWarsop1 even though we know we shouldn’t? And we compound the problem by using the same password everywhere, leaving all our accounts wide open whenever a website emails us a forgotten password in plain text with the subject line ‘password’.

I’ve been mulling over how to create passwords which you, but only you, can reverse engineer. The suggestions here aren’t best practice (I am not sure what is, these days) and an additonal option is to use a password manager. But you might find some of these approaches easy to use and more secure than what you are doing now.

We all know that passwords should be in a mix of upper and lower case with numbers and special characters, but too many people just tag a number on the end. A slightly more sophisticated alternative is to type in Leet. Leet (pronounced ‘elite’) looks like txtspk but 1s 1n f@ct ju5t sw@pp1ng letter5 with num6er5 in @ w@y th@t m0re or le55 keep5 th1ng5 legi6le. UK personal number plates tend to be in Leet.

But the challenge is more about mnemonics – devising an approach which you can remember but which is hard for others to predict. I have been playing with systems based on the name of the site or service. An example of such a system would be to assign the numbers 1-12 to the months of the year, and then count the number of letters in the site’s name. WordPress has 9 letters in it so the password would be September. There are several ways to write that in Leet, such as S3ptember. Better not to put the capital at the beginning: s3ptemBer. But what to do if the name has more than 12 letters in it? Simply do the numerologist’s trick and add the digits together so 14 becomes 5, or May.

If you don’t like months (and I don’t because I’ve just blogged about it) then other months are available. Counting rhymes are a good source of number systems. The 12 days of Christmas give us gives us nine ladies dancing, so WordPress would be ladies, or l@dIes if you write it in leet and capitalise the 3rd letter from the end. There are any number of counting rhymes like ‘One for Sorrow‘ or ‘Yan Tan Tetherer‘. There are other options: Use the 1966 England squad if you know it by heart. It’s all a matter of what you can remember without looking up.  But try to make the group not very obviously a group, which is why it is better to avoid things like the  signs of the zodiac. It is harder to spot the pattern in earnest and serve than it is to spot it in earth and saturn, so better to use one of the mnemonics for the planets and not the planets themseves.

Ten or twelve passwords isn’t that many, working with the letters in the site name gives you 26 potential passwords, for example by using the international call-sign alphabet. If you choose the first letter, WordPress would be Whisky or wh1Sky. But that’s a little obvious; if I know your WordPress password is wh1Sky it would be easy enough to guess your Yahoo one was y@nKee. It would be better to consistently choose a letter that’s not the first letter, say the third one, rendering WordPress as roM3o.

It is poor practice to have just one word in your password, so it’s better to combine the two approaches: r0M3os2ptemBer. Of course, some site somewhere will be n0vemBern0vemBer but hey.

As you can guess, I am not a fan of using the international call sign alphabet because it is so recognisable. If you have any other alphabets in your head, from reading books to your children perhaps, then better to go with them:

• A was an apple pie
• B bit it
• C cut it
• D dealt it
• E eat (ate) it
• F fought for it
• G got it
• H had it
• I inspected it
• J jumped for it
• K kept it
• L longed for it
• M mourned for it
• N nodded at it
• O opened it
• P peeped in it
• Q quartered it
• R ran for it
• S stole it
• T took it
• U upset it
• V viewed it
• W wanted it
• X, Y, Z, and ampersand
• All wished for a piece in hand

Combining this with the 12 days of Christmas would give me ranladies for WordPress, or r@nl@dIes in leet with an internal capital.

Again, other alphabets are available.  For example, the cockney alphabet which goes ‘A fer ‘orses, B fer lamb, C for th’ighlanders’. It doesn’t need to be an alphabet, any long list will do if you count A for the first place, B for the second and so on. Are you a chemist? Use the periodic table. Do you know the Modern Major General off by heart? Or the Shipping Forecast? If you struggle mnemonics for letters then Derren Brown describes several mnemonics for letters and numbers.

The thing is to devise an approach and stick to it, so that the letter that you match is always the third letter of the site’s name, you always use the international call-signs. Or whatever. Then you can reverse engineer your password any time you need to.

The problem with this is that you should change your passwords frequently, but I am rather stumped for an approach to that. You could of course just retire the 12 days of Christmas at the end of the year and replace it with Green Grow the Rushes-O or anything else that is stuck in your mind and won’t go away.

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‘Things done’: as important as ‘Things to do’

If you’ve got a lot on your plate, it is all too easy to get to the point where you cannot think of the task in hand because five or ten other things nag away at you saying they need to be done Right Now.  This more than just having a lot to do like the Red Queen in Alice who runs as fast as she can and stays in the same place.

Alice and the Red Queen

This is the state of confusion, where stuff we haven’t yet got to looms larger and larger.  We get into the state described in the general confession in the Book of Common Prayer:

We have left undone those things which we ought to have done … and there is no health in us.

This confusion is about priorities. To give you an example: many years ago when first worked from home, I was only contracted to work 15 hours’ each week. Easy enough, you would think, but I still got into this state of confusion. I was racked with guilt while I worked because I was at home and therefore should be doing housework, but the moment I started on the housework I felt guilty because I should be working. That state of confusion is made much worse when there actually is too much on your plate, of course.

Alice and the cards

One way to break the cycle is to give yourself credit for the things you do get done.  At these times I make a things done list as well as a things to do list.  Of course, you should do all the standard time management stuff like differentiating between what’s important and what’s urgent and prioritise accordingly, and turning off your email and your phone.   (Things have to be pre-apocalyptic for me to turn off Instant Messenger).

So here goes.

Last week I:

• went to the doctor and dentist which had been nagging away for ages because both were important but neither were urgent
• switched electricity suppliers and bank accounts
• dealt with a stack of post THIS high, and turned it into a stack of recycling this  high and a stack of filing this ___ high
• wrote a cheery chatty letter to my family (thank goodness for email, there’s no need to post it)
• put £4.50 into one of those booths and got myself a photo that the Daily Mail will use if I ever turn out to be a murderer, and posted it off to the driving licence people
• got a replacement sock for the New Phone of Shininess  (even my phone loses socks)
• tore down my Geocities accounts

And

• decided to ignore the fact that my wireless network needs reconfiguring and trailed a cable through the house instead

Some of it was important some of it was urgent but all of it was getting me down. I thought I was running as fast as I could to get nowhere, but when I looked at this list I realised that actually I had made a lot of progress on all sorts of things.

So that’s Ben’s Top Time Management Tip:  Keep track of what you’ve done because it gives you a sense of forward movement even when your to do list keeps on growing.

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How to improve your writing – 1

How do you improve your writing skills?  I was asked this recently, and here are Ben’s Top Tips.  It does depend on what sort of thing you are writing of course, but if you want to communicate clearly and quickly there are some definite dos and don’ts.  First, let me recommend you do a warm-up.

Practice writing summaries

The more often you practice sorting the wheat from the chaff and discarding the chaff, the more you will  improve how well you write.  At the same time, you’ll learn to pick out the key points in what you read more quickly, and your critical thinking skills will improve.  It’s  a triple whammy, which  is why I have put it at the top of the list.

Writing a précis or summary is simple but that doesn’t mean it is easy: take almost any piece of text, estimate the number of words in it (count the number of words in the first ten lines, divide by 10 and multiply by the number of lines), and re-write it at one third of its original length.  Or a fifth. Or a tenth. This forces you to work out what it actually says (not always easy) and to get rid of supporting points and padding.  It gets easier with practice and there is no substitute.  I really cannot recommend this enough.

The Pyramid Principle

This is Barbara Minto’s not mine – so read the details in her book.  This isn’t an exercise: this is how you write clear and simple prose.

Put your most important point first and then expand on it in an orderly way. We find it hard to write like this because talking works best the other way round: we soften up our audience with minor points and deliver a knock-out conclusion. It is easy to hold someone’s attention when you are talking to them, but  a reader’s attention will wander off if they don’t know why they are reading something. Your writing is not a joke: it doesn’t require a set-up and a punch-line.

To test if you’ve got this right, read the first line of each paragraph and skip the rest.  If a reader can do this and get all your key points then you’ve followed the pyramid principle. Think of this as turning bullet points into prose if you must.

This discipline improves your thinking skills: you have to know what your key points are to make each one the first sentence of a new paragraph, and it soon becomes painfully obvious when your thoughts are muddled or vapid.

This is time consuming but rewarding.  It is time consuming because it forces you to review the text several times and to move ideas up and down the page like pieces in a puzzle.  But it is rewarding because you cut out duplication and your final text is easy to read and understand.

This was originally the first part of a longer post, but I’ve decided to split it in two.  These are the most important points anyway, and I didn’t want to confuse you.

No-one gets it right the first time, so the final tip is: revise, revise, revise.

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