Writing functions both as a spotlight and as a shield. It you want it to function as the former, it's important to strip out all ambiguity from your sentences, otherwise it's simply a waste of everyone's time.
Take Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson's less-than-encouraging quotation this week about the financial markets:
"I do believe that the worst is likely to be behind us."
That came from a Wall Street Journal story, headlined: "Paulson Sees Financial Turmoil Abating." His quotation, however, says nothing of the sort. It's "likely." His quote says, to me, "maybe we're coming out of it; maybe not."
If he really means to say the financial turmoil is easing, he'd have said: "The worst is behind us."
It's unsettling--when so many of us are unsettled that we haven't hit bottom--that the secretary of the treasury is unsure.
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