Monday, February 23, 2009

Observation for the day

My textbook could probably be about one-third its current size, if its publishers employed better editors. Case in point:

"Expectations of dollar misstatement have the effect of increasing the sample size. The more dollar misstatement expected, the larger the sample size should be. Sample sizes should be larger when more dollar misstatement is expected. So, sample size varies directly with the amount of expected dollar misstatement."

That one passage just ate my brain. Seriously ... thirty seconds of my life that I will never get back. The last sentence is self-explanatory and well worded all by itself. Why is it necessary to reword this same thought four times?!

Updated: The above quote was taken directly from the 4th Edition of Smieliauskas & Bewley's "Auditing, An International Approach". Missed the citation earlier, but I should probably give credit where credit is due. Though I kind of doubt the authors of this text would actually want to take the blame credit for such a trainwreck of a passage.

3 comments:

FoN said...

That is horrible. What book did you get that from exactly??

Captain Dumbass said...

I started glazing over before the first sentence was done. That was painful.

Anonymous said...

That's the worst. I feel that way about people's blogs sometimes too! (But never yours!)