A second challenge was to write items that did not elicit socially desirable responses. One reviewer commented about an early draft of the scale: "The responses you want are normatively transparent." One strategy for dealing with the problem of social desirability was to frame items as choices between alternatives. For example, an item that originally read "good government demands ethical commitments" was revised to "the ethical commitments of public officials are more important for assuring good government than is their competence. " (The rewritten version of this item was later rejected because of its weak correlation with the overall scale.) Items were also personalized with "I" or "me" to assure that respondents did not answer in the abstract. In some cases, intensive adverbs (e.g ., rarely, definitely) were used to elicit a range of responses.