Not missing management redux

The following is a wonderfully creative response to an actual management report (not like yesterday's bogus one).  It is taken from standards for Salvation Army social service programs.  This response was shared with me, although it obviously was not submitted.

Sometimes the best way to cope with burdensome management expectations is with humor.

Standard:

• All program/corps forms and policy and procedure manuals should avoid run-on sentences and complicated language that is not easily understood by the reader.

Response:

We certainly agree and will endeavor to do our best to never let this happen because we know that it can be a drain on the reader, not least a client -- but even some of our staff have a hard time keeping things straight, so of course we would want to do that for both reasons and also our Divisional Program Secretary, who is a stickler for things like this, especially typos, would be very upset to know that anything under her Program auspices was not done well and with a professionalism that is due the reputation of our great Army (The Salvation Army) so that is another reason why we would be checking very carefully, being sure to avoid run-on sentences -- another impetus, so to speak -- to not annoy or confuse the reader who is really just interested in either knowing their rights if (for example) they are a client, or if it were to be a staff person reading, we know that they just want to know how best to do their jobs, which are so important to carrying out the mission of The Salvation Army to preach the gospel and meet human needs in Jesus' name (that was, of course, an abbreviation of the mission statement which I won't repeat here in full because of the very subject at hand), but we definitely understand the importance of appropriate sentence structure, brevity -- I once had a professor who said that the best sentences were the shortest most concise ones because, for many reasons which I won't summarize now (but just one example is one runs the risk of using the same word in the same sentence which is generally frowned upon for many reasons) -- in essence short is sweet.  I could elaborate more if you or others wish, but simply, to summarize, we definitely agree.

Thanks, Tom Dressler!