The CIA's Stylebook

[Sam]

Friends: This report on good writing tips from the CIA is of likely interest to those of us trained at City College.

Some gems:

• Keep the language crisp and pungent; prefer the forthright to the pompous and ornate.
• Do not stray from the subject; omit the extraneous, no matter how brilliant it may seem or even be.
• Favor the active voice and shun streams of polysyllables and prepositional phrases.
• Keep sentences and paragraphs short, and vary the structure of both.
• Be frugal in the use of adjectives and adverbs; let nouns and verbs show their own power.

eep the language crisp and pungent; prefer the forthright to the pompous and ornate.

And then, there's this tip for obfuscation: 

regime: has a disparaging connotation and should not be used when referring to democratically elected governments or, generally, to governments friendly to the United States.

Read more here: http://qz.com/231110/writing-tips-from-the-cias-ruthless-style-manual/

[Tom Foty]

How did they miss the lede in

"The USSR is collapsing!"