24 January 2008

I started discussing writing styles. In some cases, people rely too much on examples whereas, ideally, they should state the rule first. For example,

"Third world countries have a corruption problem, look at Indonesia and Bangladesh"

The problem is that these examples do not allow you to generalize to every third world country. You can improve the sentence by saying

"Some third world countries, like Indonesia and Bangladesh, have a corruption problem"

Although slightly better, it does not tell us much about the nature of corruption. In other words, it is not very precise. To improve this, I can say,

"Corruption exists when government officials take advantage of their position to get some kind of payment from ordinary people. Very often, corruption is linked with a high degree of bureaucracy so that - to get things done - people have little choice but to pay a bribe. Although corruption happens everywhere, some third world countries (like Indonesia and Bangladesh) are notorious for their level of corruption."

As can be seen, writing well is not difficult however one cannot afford to be lazy. One has to define words, illustrate them and remove any ambiguity from your statement.