In an unconstrained competitive free market, the presence of excess profits acts as an inducement for new competitors to enter the market, and offer comparable services at better terms in order to capture a share of the market. Applied to … Read More
1 British spelling. Follow standard British usage, but remember that influences are crossing the Atlantic all the time (for example, the spellings program and disk have become normal British usage in information technology, while sulfur has replaced sulphur in scientific … Read More
In the context of gambling activities, the criteria both of justification and proportionality have been fixed more precisely in a number of ECJ judgements concerning national statutory restrictions on gambling. This subchapter briefly illustrates in which context the categories of … Read More
Language usage. The language used should be understandable to speakers of British English (defined in the introduction to this Guide as the standard usage of Britain and Ireland). As a general rule, British English should be preferred, and Americanisms that … Read More
Lotteries In most countries, there are a variety of lottery games, often depending on when the draw is made. The precise legal definitions can be found in the national reports. Technically, a lottery is defined (in Austria, Belgium, the Czech … Read More
Too many unfamiliar abbreviations can make a document incomprehensible and send your reader to sleep: (ERDF + EAGGF + CAP = ZZZ). If the meaning ofan abbreviation might not be clear to your reader, you should: write them out in … Read More
Jargon is vocabulary used by any group of insiders or specialists to communicate with each other, and is acceptable in documents which are only read by that group. However, outsiders (especially the general public) will have to work harder than … Read More
False friends (or faux amis) are pairs of words in two languages that look similar but differ in meaning. In a multilingual environment like the European Commission, we often mix up our languages. Borrowing between French end English is common. … Read More
Another easy step to dear writing is to useverbs in the active voice (‘the car hit a tree’) rather than the passive (‘a tree was hit by the car‘). Compare these: BAD: New guidelines have been laid downbythe President in … Read More
Concrete messages are clear – abstract language canbe vague and off-putting. Too much abstract language might even lead your reader to think either that you don’t know what you are writing about or that your motives for writingare suspect. Unless … Read More
One simple way to write more dearly is to change … this (BAD)… => … to this (GOOD): by the destruction of => by destroying for the maximisation of => for maximising of the introduction of => of introducing … Read More
You may have to write (or improve) a text containing a mass of facts and ideas. Here are some ways of untangling the information so that readers will understand each sentence straight away. Name the agents of each action and … Read More
