5.3
Audience Relationship: Emphasize the Positive Revise these sentences to be positive rather than negative.

• a. To avoid damage to your credit rating, please remit payment within 10 days.
• b. We don’t offer refunds on returned merchandise that is soiled.
• c. Because we are temporarily out of Baby Cry dolls, we won’t be able to ship your order for 10 days.
• d. You failed to specify the color of the blouse that you ordered.
• e. You should have realized that waterbeds will freeze in unheated houses during winter. Therefore, our guarantee does not cover the valve damage, and you must pay the $9.50 valve-replacement fee (plus postage).

5.5
Audience Relationship: Bias-Free Language Rewrite each of the following to eliminate bias:

• a. For an Indian, Maggie certainly is outgoing.
• b. He needs a wheelchair, but he doesn’t let his handicap affect his job performance.
• c. A pilot must have the ability to stay calm under pressure, and then he must be trained to cope with any problem that arises.
• d. Candidate Renata Parsons, married and the mother of a teenager, will attend the debate.
• e. Senior citizen Sam Nugent is still an active salesman.

5.10
Message Composition: Selecting Words As you rewrite these sentences, replace the clichés and buzzwords with plain language (if you don’t recognize any of these terms, you can find definitions online):

• a. Being a jack-of-all-trades, Dave worked well in his new general manager job.
• b. Moving Leslie into the accounting department, where she was literally a fish out of water, was like putting a square peg into a round hole, if you get my drift.
• c. My only takeaway from the offsite was that Laird threw his entire department under the bus for missing the deadline.
• d. I’ve love to help with that project, but I’m bandwidth-constrained.
• e. The board green-lighted our initiative to