JAC Online: 16.3 Reducing complex relationships to quantifiable data is part of the institution's effort to manage large amounts of information efficiently. And this reduction was enforced by a prevailing style that demanded very short documents, usually comprised of bulleted sentence fragments. But as Steve Katz has argued, the rhetoric of expediency upon which such managerial pragmatism depends often has obviously ideological sources and severe cultural consequences. The biologist with whom we worked explained that this reductive style largely excluded careful discussion of ecological issues. As he put it:

But when you can't get a document out of the office or beyond a certain place in the chain if it's longer than a page or written in complete sentences and they only want a bullet format--the famous . . . bullet format--you lose all ability to explain, to teach, to support your point of view. To me it feels very conspiratorial, because in a way it relieves these people. They can say "Oh well, somewhere down the line a decision was made."