Common Problems in World Bank Writing

Let’s take a look at the example that was used on the previous screen to illustrate ineffective writing. The example is contrived for the purposes of this demonstration, but it is still typical of how a text that has many stylistic flaws can create problems for your readers. It contains each of the sentence problems that you are going to examine in this module:

• Sentence branching
• Absence of action (noun-based style, passive voice)
• Unnecessary words
• Jargon, acronyms, foreign expressions
• Elegant variation

To reveal these problems, click on the different parts of the example with your mouse.

You will now analyze each of these sentence problems in turn.