Grammatically Correct: The writer's essential guide to punctuation ...

GRAMMATICALLY CORRECT
can easily be reduced to four and three, respectively.
BETTER: The family-oriented approach to medical care involves
recognizing that an ailment of one family member will have an impact
on all. A family is continually subject to both inner and outer pressures,
and a serious illness of one of its members increases both these types of
pressure. Internally, the illness forces an adaptation by other members of
their roles and expectations; externally, in this age of specialized medicine,
it typically demands interaction with multiple health care settings and
personnel. Thus, a key focus offamily assessment in health-related research
and practice must be on stress and coping.
EXAMPLE 2
The Software Development Manager program provides software
development organizations with a mechanism for efficiently managing
the components of a software application throughout all development
stages of the application. Software Development Manager enables a
group of software developers to create and manage multiple versions of
a software application. This software manager program also maintains
the integrity of the application by not allowing one developer to overwrite
another developer's changes to the source.
Here, in three sentences, the word software appears seven times,
develop (or some derivation of it) seven times, manage (or some
derivation of it) five times and application four times. Below, these
counts are reduced to three each.
BETTER: The Software Development Manager program provides a
mechanism for efficiently managing the components of a software
application throughout all stages of its development. This program
enables a group of software developers to create and manage multiple
versions of an application, and maintains the integrity of the application
by not allowing one group member to overwrite the source changes of
another.
Note: The advice about not overusing a word should not be taken
to mean that it's a good idea to use different terminology to describe
the same concept. In many fields, particularly those in science and
technology, terms have very precise meanings, and calling the same
thing by different names will only lead to confusion and misinterpre-
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