Next, list separate thoughts being expressed in each sentence. The first
sentence:
After looking thoroughly at your reports on last month’s sales calls
describing who you saw and what objections to closing the sales were
raised, and reviewing those special and extraordinary events such as
the blizzard in the upper Midwest, as well as standard events such
as President’s Day, there seems to be no clear or definitive reason why
sales are down.
The thoughts and ideas expressed are:
1. I’ve looked at your reports.
2. I’ve read whom you called on and why they said no deal.
3. I’ve considered whether special events such as blizzards would
account for weak sales.
4. I’ve considered whether the shortened work month (because of
the President’s Day holiday) would account for the weak sales.
5. I can’t understand why sales are down.
Five separate points, all independent and necessary, are a lot to integrate
into one sentence.
In the second sentence, there were three separate thoughts expressed:
In anticipation of our next regular meeting, I would like to solicit your
good ideas about what’s going wrong and what we all and each of us
can do to impact it.
1. I’m getting ready for our next sales meeting.
2. I want to know what you think the problem is.
3. I want to know what you think we can do to fix the problem.
We now have a total of eight thoughts to express. Were there any
redundancies? Did you select more precise words? Eliminating redundancies
and evaluating modifiers makes shortening and separating
thoughts and ideas easier.