repetitive text and voice

[Michele_Berkes -at- CCMAIL -dot- OSTI -dot- GOV]

Hello all!

I am working on revising a brochure that describes the database that our
consortium produces. The database scope is very broad (energy research and
technology). For information going out to a general audience, we group the
database coverage into 13 major subject areas. (For the serious researcher,
there's also a detailed subject categories and scope publication. The
brochure is just to give a flavor of the breadth of coverage we have.)

For the previous edition of the brochure, I gave a brief description of the
content of each of the subject areas. To introduce a little variety into
these 13 paragraphs, I used "You can find ..." as well as "This area
contains ..." and other variations. A brief example:

     Environmental Sciences
     This area is broadly defined as information on the effects of any
     energy-related activity on the environment, on methods or policies for
     mitigating or eliminating adverse effects, and on technical bases for
     ensuring that energy policies are environmentally safe and socially
     acceptable. All energy technologies are covered.

     Fission Reactor and Isotope Technology
     You can find research on nuclear power reactors and associated plants,
     including research on nuclear fuels and general studies of reactor
     physics and engineering, in this section. In addition, this section
     contains research related to isotope and radiation source technology.

I won't subject you to all 13 descriptions ;-). To get a feel for what
this feels like repeated 13 times, please see
http://www.etde.org/edb/subjdetl.html.  (If you'd like to see the whole
brochure, a PDF is at http://www.etde.org/abtetde/endbbroc.pdf)

In this past year's STC publications competition, some of the judges
objected to this "shifting voice".

Now it's time to revise the brochure. So my question is, how would you try
to convey this information? This is a marketing piece, attempting (within
our limited budget) to appeal to funding managers, scientists, librarians,
managers in energy-related industries, and so on.

If you've made it this far, thanks for sticking with me. I appreciate any
advice, insights, etc. that you can share.

Michele Berkes
Energy Technology Data Exchange
michele_berkes -at- ccmail -dot- osti -dot- gov
www.etde.org