I've been subscribing to Jakob Nielsen's wonderful (and free) usability newsletter for some months now and today it lead me to meander around his extremely usable and useful website... where I encountered a great example of bad writing made good.

Nielsen's team took a technical website that had been using a white paper as its online copy (big no-no) and set about adapting it for web usability. The adaptation process was fairly simple but what a difference it made -- the resulting copy delivered 159% greater usability.

The first link below shows you a section of the original copy:

Sample 1

Now here's the rewritten version:

Sample 2

Note the numbered list, the simplified but technically accurate text, the bold-faced words of importance, and the elimination of unnecessary verbiage.

This is just a short sample and it doesn't illustrate all the possible ways to make your copy more usable. If you're interested in learning more, here's Nielsen's excellent web writing tutorial:

http://www.useit.com/papers/webwriting/