[greymule]

Someone can author anything from poetry to instructions for using a belt buckle. It can be perfectly composed, yet it isn't worth an out-of-play foul ball with two strikes in a FP game if the people to whom it is directed have a difficult time understanding it. After all, is that not why some writers opt for prose in lieu of poetry?

There's a common misconception that good writing must be fancy, convoluted, and hard to understand. Our teachers told us that Shakespeare was great, and because the words and structure of Elizabethan English are unfamiliar to modern-day readers, we associate great writing with difficulty in comprehension. Shakespeare was not difficult for his audiences. Dickens and Poe crafted long and complicated sentences. Therefore, people assume, good writing must involve long and complicated sentences.

This idea has been reinforced by the schools. Remember when some major project was due and everyone was asking, "How long is your paper?" The smart kids turned in a lot of pages and got a good grade, right? They also wrote long, complicated sentences.

The teacher loved it when we used "better" words in our writing, too. Doesn't demonstrate indicate more intelligence than show? Why use if when in the event that sounds more impressive and helps fill up the page? Weren't salubrious and desuetude on the list of vocabulary words? Hey, let's fit them in somehow.

These unfortunate "lessons" are the root of much of the poor business and professional writing we see today. But anybody can write impressive sounding gobbledygook. (Legal writing often cannot be put into language the average person can grasp easily. A statute can't say simply "if anyone has a claim on this property," because "claim" might not include warrants, mortgages, liens, etc. Also, "anyone" might fail to cover non-human legal entities.)

Anyway, the idea is not to create a literary classic out of the rule book. The point is to use clear, precise, accurate, unambiguous language. That's not as easy as it sounds. It's an art, too, except that the rule book has nothing to say about life, death, man's inhumanity to man, love, God, sin, ambition, etc. Nobody's expecting phrases so striking that they will become part of everyday language (though you could make a case for "travesty of the game"). The rule book will not have a profound effect on anyone; it contains no revelations; it is not improved by being translated into great poetry.

As far as the grammar police go, nobody really cares about minor technical violations in a rule book. But usually correcting the grammar aids in understanding.

As for faulty syntax:

ASA book: "In the Slow Pitch game, any fair fly ball touched by a defensive player on either side of the fence that clears or has cleared the fence in fair territory, should be declared a four-base award and shall not be included in the total of over-the-fence home runs."

Revision: "In the Slow Pitch game, any fair fly ball that is touched, on either side of the fence, by a defensive player and that clears or has cleared the fence in fair territory shall be declared a four-base award and shall not be included in the total of over-the-fence home runs."