11th December 2011, 01:34 PM
Ignoring all the bad spelling/grammar, the overall format of some units' reports makes them virtually impenetrable. While it presents all of the information, long paragraphs detailing every dimension and detailed soil descriptions for every one of a line of fifteen postholes are likely to make any reader give up, and frankly anyone that interested will probably have gone back to the site archive anyway...and then there's the opposite where all of the description/finds info etc has been banished to a set of tables somewhere in an appendix - again, after 5 minutes the reader (this one anyway) usually winds up screaming and hurling the hateful thing across the room in despair. The variant is where the whole thing was clearly originally written up as tables then bodged together into 'prose', resulting in endless repetition without any 'flow' - aaahhhh! Any half-competent author should be able to keep the thing readable, otherwise what's the point, no one is going to read it!....that could of course explain the lack of editing...
The best reports tell a story without boring the reader too much along the way?
The best reports tell a story without boring the reader too much along the way?