[wombatmobile]

This is clear writing?

2. Because we know nothing about the local conditions, we could not determine how effectively the committee had allocated funds to areas that need the most assistance.

We can't tell if the committee spent wisely because we don't know our way around here.

[ACow_Adonis]

The later is hardly clear writing. I think you've mistaken terseness and informality for clarity.

You misconstrue "wise spending" with "allocating funds to areas that need the most assistance". The two are not informationally equivalent.

You leave out the information that you know nothing about local conditions. Presumably you've jumped to conclusions about what local conditions means.

And lastly, it must be pointed out that a perfectly valid interpretation of your version is that you were unable to form an opinion on the committees spending because you got lost in the carpark/ building/town...

I think one could arguably simplify the original further to:

"Knowing nothing about local conditions, we could not determine how effectively the committee allocated funds to areas needing the most assistance."

But it's very hard to move past that without fundamental information changing, and even my changes I accept are a little bit stylistically subjective, albeit with a marginally lower word count to convey fundamentally the same information.

[Veen]

Your version shows the problem with taking advice to "omit needless words" too far. The main virtue of good writing is clarity, and that often needs more words than a maximally compressed sentence. Your version omits useful information, is imprecise, and uses a vague idiom that is easily misinterpreted. In short, it doesn't say the same thing.

[rezendi]

The first example smacks of writing which is not so much unclear as it is deliberately banal and devoid of impact, as famously described by Orwell here: https://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_poli...