http://writetodone.com/2009/12/17/the-golden-rule-of-writing/

One of the ideas that has stuck with me from my brief stint consulting with Microsoft's marketing department is the concept they called "Defend Every Word" as a shorthand editing technique for all publicly facing prose. The concept is that one should be able to point to each word in their document and defend the veracity of its claim and the necessity of its inclusion in the document.  It's useful for cutting out buzzwords, refining pitches, and clearing out room for misinterpretation in web copy. Though it often encourages terse writing, in practice treating each word as an essay's thesis awaiting facts in its defense can generate more verbiage through the process.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/12/04/jefferson.letter/index.html

A grad student finding a letter of recommendation from Jefferson is not so interesting in itself, despite the library official's attempts to make it sound like a testament to Jefferson's humility which belied an unfamiliarity with the tone of such letters surprising from a university official. The interesting line in the article was this one...

"Historians had been aware of the existence of the letter, thanks to Jefferson's use of a portable copying press, one of his many inventions."

It is of course unclear what they mean - I assume there a copy of this letter already in the possession of the authorities, and this is the original?

But I was curious about the invention - it turns out that they're talking about the polygraph machine:

http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/it/2001/2/2001_2_52.shtml

Cool, huh?