3. Ability to express a thought with precision, clarity and economy.

Sentences
• Most sentences are short and don't exceed 20 words. No sentence expresses more than one complex thought.
• Sentences focus on the actor, the action and the object.
• Words are arranged with care in subject, verb and object order.
• Modifiers -- Describing words/phrases are placed near the words they modify.
• Parallelism -- Grammatically equal sentence elements are used to express two or more matching ideas/items in a series.
• Effective emphasis is achieved within sentences by moving from old to new, short to long.

Words
• Words are familiar and concrete.
• Legalese, Latinisms, pomposities, bureaucratese, jargon, and word gaffes (affect for effect) are not used.

Wordiness
• Verbose word clusters (the fact that) and compound prepositions (with regard to, prior to, pursuant to) are not used.
• Throat clearing -- such as "it is interesting to note," -- is not present.
• Redundancies (surviving widow, free gift, brown in color) are not present.
• Double and multiple negatives are avoided

Verbs
• Active voice is preferred over passive voice except in limited circumstances.
• Base verbs are preferred over nominalizations.
• Strong, precise verbs carry the load in sentences. Using is, are, was, were is minimized.