Local Revision: Wordiness

Zebest, Orin "Pen to Paper" 10/1/07 via flickr. Public Domain

In a QRG, it's important to give readers the essential facts about your topic without having any extra "weight" to slow them down. To accomplish for myself, I went in and revised one of my paragraphs to make it slimmer.

Link to Project One Draft

Before
"In fact, in the report published by the USFWS forensics lab, out of 141 bird carcasses found at the Ivanpah plant, only 47 (33%) of the fatalities could be linked to exposure from the solar flux. After the initial report from the AP, BrightSource Energy quickly responded, stating that “Ivanpah reported 321 avian fatalities between January and June 2014, of which 133 were related to solar flux” rather than the 28,000 estimated fatalities within the AP report. BrightSource also commented that the vast majority of the avian deaths cause at the plant were within 280 meters of a heliostat, which accounted for 94% of all carcasses found on the 3,900 acre property, allowing them to accurately predict the total number of birds affected. This shows that the claims originally made by the AP and rallied around by various different groups were far from reality."

After
"After the AP's initial report, BrightSource Energy responded quickly, stating that "Ivanpah reported 321 avian fatalities between January and June 2014, of which 133 were related to solar flux" rather than the 28,000 estimated fatalities. In a report published by the USFWS lab, only 47 (33%) of 141 bird carcasses found at the plant could be linked to exposure from the solar flux. BrightSource Energy also commented that 94% of the avian deaths studied were found within 280 meters of a tower, allowing them to accurately predict fatalities within the 3,900 acre area. These studies show that the AP's initial claims were far from reality."

I believe that through editing this section I enhanced the readability greatly by working to reduce unnecessary clutter in the paragraph and arranging it differently so that it gave a steady stream of information rather than jerky tidbits like before.