“The Impediments of Style” by Dominic Smith

An essay by faculty member Dominic Smith appears at The Millions:

Earlier this year, when the CIA’s style manual was released online (pdf), writers and editors across the web took note. Bureaucracies are often criticized for propagating opaque prose — the kind of double-speak that pronounces very little with an abundance of words. But here were CIA directives that sounded far more like Strunk and White than big government.

Keep the language crisp and pungent; prefer the forthright to the pompous and ornate.

Favor the active voice and shun streams of polysyllables and prepositional phrases.

Be frugal in the use of adjectives and adverbs; let nouns and verbs show their own power.

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