Consider the following two versions of a text the conclusion of a short story written for a training course. The narrator recalls an incident from his childhood. He and his twin brother, aged ten at the time, are waiting in the local barber ‘s shop to have their hair cut. The barber, preparing to shave another customer, is stropping his razor and grinning at the two boys. A voice on the radio is meanwhile reporting a local murder case – an elderly woman had had her throat cut while eating dinner in bed.
First version
The Police broke into the house the next afternoon. They searched the kitchen and hall, but found nothing out of the ordinary. They then rushed upstairs. Even though they knew what to expect, they were shocked at what they saw. Entering the bedroom, they saw the corpse staring back at them from the bed. She was still sitting upright, but the napkin at her  throat now had a dark reddish-brown stain on it.
The barber put down the leather strap. He tested the razor with his thumb. Then he waved it in the air for a moment, and brought it gently down to rest just below the customer’s ear.
This was too much for my brother and me. We looked at each other, and the tension broke. We launched into action. Without a word we jumped up, clutching our hats, and raced out of the shop.
Edited version
The Police broke into the house the next afternoon. They searched the kitchen and hall: nothing.
They rushed upstairs to the bedroom. And saw the corpse staring back at them from the bed. Still sitting upright-but the napkin at her throat now had a dark stain.
The barber put down the leather strap. He tested the razor with his thumb. Then he waved it in the air for a moment. Then he brought it gently down to rest, just below the customer’s ear.
I looked at my brother. My brother looked at me.
Without a word, clutching our hats, we raced out of the shop.
What makes the edited version so much tighter and more effective and more dramatic? Above all, the simple deletion of various inefficient words, phrases, or sentences. Inefficient because unnecessary for the purpose of the story. The word reddish-brown is unnecessary: a dark stain, in this context, needs no further explaining. Similarly, the sentence we launched into action adds nothing, except wordiness, to the account of the scene.

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Here are extracts from two editorial articles in The Times of London. They appeared on the same day – 82 years apart. Note how the style of writing has changed. The language of The Times in the late 20th century certainly remains fairly formal and sophisticated by modern standards, and the sentences are fairly long, averaging about 20 words in the 1989 extract here. But the writing is still far simpler and less stilted than that of The Times in the early years of the century. The sentences in the 1907 extract average nearly 40 words in length. And more to the point, their syntax is vastly more convoluted.
He has also discovered, however, that when Molotov put his hasty signature to the agreement  with Ribbentrop, he and Stalin started the clock of a sizeable time bomb. Its tick is heard louder by the day, especially in the Baltic Republics and what is now Soviet Moldavia.
Reform at home has dictated that foreign policy be recast. Tippex has been applied to the script from which the late Mr Gromyko read so glumly and for so long. ‘No’ has given way to ‘maybe’and even occasionally to ‘why not’? It is in West Germany that Mr Gorbachov’s charm offensive has made the deepest inroads. The Soviet leader’s siren song about a common European home has beguiled large numbers of West Germans, and for many in the Federal Republic reunification is ceasing to be a repressed dream. The relationship between Germany and the Soviet Union is once again of major importance in Europe.
-The Times, 23 August 1989.
It is highly characteristic of our English way of doing business that, while many days are often spent by the House of Commons in wrangling about controversial trifles, a couple of hours at the fag-end of the session suffices for the introduction and acceptance of a measure of high imperial interest.
Such is the happy fate of the Northern Nigerian railway, disposed of yesterday in a couple of clauses of the public Works Loans Bill. Mr Runciman, the secretary of the Treasury, introduced the Bill, and Mr Churchill explained the proposal at some length, repeating in greater detail the facts which he had briefly indicated a little more than a fortnight ago. While, of course, repudiating the hint of the other side, that the Bill savoured of protection, Mr Churchill claimed that it was part of ‘the policy of improving the communications by sea and land across the surface of the British Empire’.
-The Times, 23 August 1907.

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Rearrange the following seven sentences into the well-structured paragraph they originally formed. (Just to establish the context: in the book from which the paragraph is taken, the preceding paragraph had been discussing some of the differences between American and British pronunciation of vowel sounds.)
As cues, attend not just to the sense of each sentence,but to the ‘signposts’ as well –the linking words such as however or for example, and the pronoun it.

1. As a result, southeastern English on the whole moves faster than American English, since there are fewer stresses.
2. Northern English speech, however, is closer to American in movement than southeastern English is.
3. In general, southeastern English uses more violent stress contrasts and a wider range of pitch than American does.
4. This is the case, for example, with words ending in –ary, like military and temporary , where the American has a secondary stress on the third syllable.
5. There are also differences between British and American English in stress and intonation.
6. Where the Englishman gives a word one heavy stress and several very weak ones, the American often gives it a secondary stress on one of the weak syllables.
7. And it tends to have more reduced vowels than American English (as in the third syllable of military).

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Here is a clever transition or ‘bridge’ between two items on a weekly magazine programme  on the radio. Following an extract of serious modern music, the presenter repeats the composer’s name and identifies the composition, and then introduces a further musical item- a comic take-off  of Verdi’s opera La Traviata, this time:
Berio, in ‘The Labyrinth’ on Radio 3.
Cantabile presented an opera with a pretty labyrinthine plot, on Radio 2: ‘La Traviata . . .
-Margaret Howard, ‘Pick of the week’,
BBC Radio 4
The presenter has actually forged a double link here- the labyrinthine plot of the second item puns on the title of the first item, The Labyrinth. And the phrase Radio  2 harks back contrastingly to the phrase Radio 3.
Continuity links are not always as smooth as that. All too often they sound extremely strained. Various producers or announcers appear in fact to run a secret competition for the silliest or most far-fetched or most complicated links or bridging announcements.
Exposing the absurdity of such artificial continuity, two comic musicians provided the following satiric link between  two numbers  they were performing on a radio programme:
That first piece was the overture to Tancredi, by Rossini. The opera is set at the time of the Crusaders.
The crusaders fought the heathen Saladin. Wooden bowls is what you find salad in.
Bowls was the favourite game of Sir Francis Drake.
He fought and defeated the Armada.
The Armada came from spain.
Which leads us neatly to Bizet’s opera Carmen, which is also set in spain, from which we’d like to play the seguidilla – from Carmen.
-‘The Classic Buskers’, BBC Radio 2
Here are the views of another  satirist:
Radio 4 has invented a kind of English not found anywhere else in the media: the radio link.
This consists of taking two topics which have absolutely nothing in common and then finding a link between them, and the more tortuous the better.
One example comes from a presenter who was linking a murder thriller to a programme about
Cheese-making : ‘And from something blood-curding to something rather more milk-curding . . . ‘ She might equally well have said: ‘And so from the gruesome to the Gruyere . . .’
What’s  amazing is that this sort of contorted thinking has not spread. It  seems a natural way of doing the Radio 4 news headlines:
‘New controls were announced today by President Mubarak to bring tourism back to Egypt. And talking of pyramid selling, that’s just one of the many financial devices that Mrs Thatcher promised this  afternoon to examine more closely, as she spoke in the Mother of Russian dissident Yuri Orlov who made the headlines in Moscow today with a brave declaration of liberty. A brave declaration of liberty. A brave declaration of another kind was made by David Gower in Jamaica, where England are only 356 behind the West Indies and their steaming attack, though steaming is hardly the word to apply to the weather which will continue cold and frosty . . .
-Miles Kington, The Times

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Here are a few captivating opening paragraphs or sentences from various novels. Non-fiction too reads all the better for an interesting opening – it lures the reader in. On a smaller scale, even the humblest business report would benefit from an incisive start. It might stimulate the prejudiced reader into paying more attention.
I was singing the hired assassin in Rigoletto the time I was propositioned to become one myself.
-Angus Hall, The Rigoletto Murder
Nobody could sleep. When morning came, assault craft would be lowered and a first wave of troops would ride through the surf and charge ashore on the beach of Anopopei. All over the ship, all through the convoy, there was a knowledge that in a few hours some of them were going to be dead.
-Norman Mailer (U.S.),
The Naked and the Dead
When a day that you happen to know is Wednesday starts off by sounding like Sunday, there is something seriously wrong somewhere.
-John Wyndham,
The Day of the Triffids
The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning.
Then the soul-erosion produced by high gambling- a compost of greed and fear and nervous tension- becomes unbearable and the senses awake and revolt from it.
-Ian Fleming, Casino Royale
Hale Knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him.
-Graham Greene, Brighton Rock
It was bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, through not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him.
-George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
I am going to pack my two shirts with my other socks and my best suit in the little blue cloth my mother used to tie round her hair when she did the house , and I am going from the Valley.
-Richard Liewellyn,How Green Was My Valley
By ten-forty-five it was all over.The town was occupied, the defenders defeated, and the war finished.
-John Steinbeck (U.S.), The Moon is Down

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