There was one particular point we forgot to mention in our last 800-word tirade about the importance of getting your communication right for your reader.

While we were emphasising the need to write for the reader, we didn't say anything about the other side of the coin — the need to edit for both the reader and the writer.

Those of us who do both, editing and writing, know who has the harder task.

The writer writes, with no ultimate responsibility to anything but the content and anyone but the reader.

The editor shares both these responsibilities, but also assumes the added burden of keeping faith with the style or persona of the writer.

That's not to say that most of the material we are paid to work on has anything resembling style, in the high-faluting literary sense.

But even after the skilled e-editor has done his or her worst, cutting and polishing like some dedicated craftsman in an Antwerp diamond house,* the shorter, clearer, stronger piece that emerges should still have something of the author in it.

Almost intuitively, the editor will work to preserve or echo the speech rhythms and syntax that appear in the draft text. Words and phrases will be chosen that sit comfortably alongside the author's own phrasing. Odd or eccentric expressions may survive into the final document, simply because they carry the stamp of an individual consciousness and something would be lost if their idiosyncrasies were ironed out.

Except in contexts where no bylines are used and house rules dictate a homogenised style, conserving these glimpses of personality and voice is important.

The sense of characters behind the words is part of what makes a publication or a Web site feel alive and vivid, though most people are completely unaware of it at any conscious level.

Experience teaches, of course, that non-professional authors almost invariably believe their style has been ruined and their meaning twisted in the subbing process, while the professionals usually appreciate what's been done for them.

The trick is to put the content and the audience first. Once you know the text is saying what it should, in a way that will be clear and accessible to your audience, you can then start worrying about the writer's voice and personality.

You may even find, on a final read-through, that you can see opportunities to restore a couple of words or phrases that are obviously dear to the author's heart, as the context is now clear enough to make them work. If so, do it. It makes good career sense to keep as many of these people on your side as possible.

* Incidentally, our research shows that about 40% of a rough diamond is lost in the cutting and polishing. We think that's an interesting figure, and one that might give a useful clue to the degree of cutting many business drafts could bear.

Just time today for a quick gloat about the consequences of our recent troublemaking at the British Library (see posting of 1 October).

While the custodians of the national culture were clearly less than delighted when the E-EDITOR style police pointed out the glaring mistake on their display panel promoting the current Graham Greene exhibition, they did mutter that they would correct it and get the 9-foot panel remade.

A return visit this week proved that they have been as good as their word. Where the blurb for the Greene exhibition once talked about world-weary "ex-patriots", it now refers to equally world-weary "expatriates".

And, as if liberated by a new certainty and sense of purpose, the authorities have gone mad and erected two of these panels, where there was originally just the one.

If that means just a few more visitors are lured inside to learn more about Graham Greene and his writings, we'll feel our crabbing, pernickety intervention was more than justified.

After all, Greene has long been up there in the E-EDITOR pantheon (see the FAQ section of the main www.e-editor.co.uk site), alongside other literary heroes and influences ranging from Wodehouse, Stoppard and Douglas Adams to Michael Bywater, Smokey Robinson, Winston Churchill and Elvis Costello.

An e-mail from an E-EDITOR enthusiast in Brisbane alerts us to bad news for fans of Bullfighter — the unique bullshit-hunting, jargon-shaming software distributed free of charge by Deloitte Consulting.

Just 18 months after Bullfighter came along to save the world from a million lousy, pompous, overblown travesties of the art of business communication, Deloitte has withdrawn support for this excellent initiative.

There's no explanation on the firm's Web site, merely a statement that the software is no longer available or being distributed. There is no indication that it has been withdrawn for updating or revision, so we can only fear the worst.

Needless to say, E-EDITOR has already been in touch with Deloitte, enquiring about Bullfighter's future and offering to host the download service on a non-profit basis. So far, there has been no acknowledgement or response.

This is all a great shame. Bullfighter has been genuinely useful in helping e-editors throughout the English-speaking world stand up to the daily barrage of illiterate, self-serving, obscurantist nonsense that emanates from management and government.

It could easily have been marketed as a fully commercial product, but it seemed doubly creditable that Deloitte had made it available to all as a free download.

We recognised the marketing and branding benefits Deloitte derived from Bullfighter. But we felt they were entirely deserved, a well-earned payoff for taking a stand in a matter of some importance.

Now, though, the whole exercise is beginning to look less altruistic.

Deloitte has reaped a vast amount of positive PR, but the firm's relationship with its jargon-sniffing creation was always likely to become problematical. Perhaps Bullfighter has been gored because it was too near the knuckle.

Perhaps Bullfighter set standards its progenitors could not live up to.

Perhaps it was simply too uncomfortable for Deloitte's consultants to go about their daily business without deploying the usual range of faddish buzzwords, mangled metaphors and half-understood jargon that passes for management discourse.

We hope not. These people had the guts to back the idea of Bullfighter in the first instance, in the full knowledge that it would inevitably be let loose on their own output.

They knew what they were doing. And they must have calculated that Deloitte could cope with a bit of teasing, in exchange for a significant boost to its credibility and reputation for straight talking.

If the consultants want to back off now, they should seriously consider handing Bullfighter over to E-EDITOR, the Plain English Campaign or some other trusted body that could continue to make it available to the world.

Better still, they should relaunch an improved version, Bullfighter 2, and carry on the good work themselves.

Having created a clear opportunity to differentiate Deloitte Consulting from its competitors in a unique and sustainable way, they should exploit it to the full. There's enough mileage left in the Bullfighter concept to keep it going strong for many years to come.

One major aspect of the e-editor's work that is never written about or discussed in polite society is the way lists are handled.

Yet how an e-editor chooses to present listed material can make a huge difference to the impact and clarity of the final communication.

There are potent cultural assumptions embedded in the reader's response to any list.

For example, unless there is an extremely strong and unusual reason for it to be otherwise, the reader will always assume that a list is presented in order of relevance or importance.

If a writer is talking about EU markets for business or consumer products — whether they are servers, shoes or mobile phones — the reader will expect to see lists that begin with Germany, the UK, France and Italy, as they have far bigger populations and economies than the other countries.

A list that starts off "Austria, Belgium, Denmark..." needs to have a very good excuse for mentioning these tiny markets (each with five to ten million inhabitants) ahead of the big countries.

Germany has 82 million people, the UK 60 million, France 59 million and Italy 58 million. In almost any context or product category, these huge economies are just more important than the tiddlers.

Listing the EU states alphabetically is fair enough in the rarefied milieu of Brussels and Strasbourg protocols and diplomacy. In anything remotely resembling the real world, it's just nonsense.

There is a good reason for feeling uncomfortable and short-changed when faced with a list that defaults to dumb alphabeticism.

Properly ordered lists convey implicit information. The EU list that begins "Germany, the UK, France, Italy..." actually tells readers, tactfully, that France has more people than Italy, which is not a matter of universal knowledge.

The big world list that begins "China, India, US, Indonesia, Brazil, Russia..." is even more significant. Not one person in 50 could tell you that Brazil has now overtaken Russia, which is losing population year by year, to become the fifth most populous country.

So the mere shape of a list can politely educate and inform the reader. Since the alphabetical running order is always the same, the chance to convey this extra information is completely lost, and an element of understanding is immediately forfeited.

Failing to stack items in order of significance is simply unnatural. Randomised and alphabetical lists tend to look stupid. Manchester United is not the 13th most important club in the Premiership. No-one sends out party invitations to their "cousins, nephews, parents, neighbours, brothers and sisters, aunts and children". Survival in the desert requires "water, shelter, food and anti-glare sunglasses", not "anti-glare sunglasses, food, shelter and water". Any deviation from the natural or expected order of a list draws attention to itself and distracts the reader — the cardinal sin in the e-editor's world.

Most people have now cottoned on to the idea of using bullet point lists — especially on Web pages — to improve readability, avoid repetition and help them manage dense material. The shape on the page is right. Now we need a lot more thought about how the information is ordered within those lists.

There's nothing more depressing than happening upon a neglected blog, the online equivalent of the Marie Celeste. Drifting abandoned and unloved, crew's breakfast on the table, no-one on deck and no obvious explanation... You know the scenario.

But even a break in transmission of nearly two months doesn't mean we've gone off the air for good.

Despite the distractions of running a new series of training sessions on writing for the Web and taking on some major new commitments that cannot yet be discussed in public, we are still determined to keep E-EDITOR alive and pernicketing.

Curiously enough, this period of quiescence has seen a sudden surge in the number of hits on both the main Web site and the weblog. We've had a flurry of interest from English and Welsh universities, an unexplained barrage of hits from readers in Italy and a large number of visits to the blog via a glowing recommendation in Amy Gahran's excellent Contentious blog for North American writers and editors.

We've also been invited to contribute to The Editorial Eye, a respected US newsletter that has been around for nearly 20 years.

All of which makes it rather frustrating that we have not been able to devote the necessary time to keeping the blog itself moving along.

However — and we admit you might think you had heard such promises before — we are now really back on track.

We have guaranteed postings lined up for the next few weeks, starting later this week with E-EDITOR's trenchant poetic riposte to the old Humbert Wolfe slander that begins "You cannot hope to bribe or twist, thank God, the British journalist..."

This little snatch of elegant doggerel has been the bane of the journalising classes since 1930 and has annoyed us for many years, so we've finally come up with what we feel is a suitably robust reply. Bet you can't wait.

OK, here we go. Last week we promised you E-EDITOR’s poetic riposte to that stylishly slanderous piece of doggerel “You cannot hope to bribe or twist, thank God, the British journalist...”

The verse was written in 1930 for Punch, the satirical magazine that was part of the backbone of British culture and traditionally littered the waiting rooms of the nation’s dentists.

Punch attracted many of the best writers and cartoonists in Britain throughout its extraordinarily long life, from 1841 to 2002.

But Humbert Wolfe, poet, civil servant and author of this one memorable anti-journo squib, was by no means the greatest of them. Though he published 40 books of prose and verse and was once the bookies’ favourite to become Poet Laureate, history has not been kind to the man his biographer called “Harlequin in Whitehall”.

In practice, these four lines constitute his entire claim to immortality.

You cannot hope to bribe or twist,
Thank God, the British journalist.
But seeing what the man will do unbribed
There’s no occasion to.

To which E-EDITOR indignantly, and not a moment too soon, responds:

A greater calumny, I think
Words never yet expressed in ink.
And when I find the bum who wrote ’em,
I’ll have them tattooed on his scrotum.

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