Mature Moses’s reform prose reduced complexity to fundamentals

Evidence

The prose with which Moses prefaced the report had in particular the ring of the battle trumpet. The 5,200-word opening declaration of “Underlying Principles,” written almost entirely by Moses and left untouched by Belle Moskowitz, contained hard, lucid, driving reasoning that reduced complexities to fundamentals. Dealing with a point that reformers generally tried to avoid because of their fear that it was a weak spot in their argument, Moses plunged instead to its heart and found there complete compatibility with the basic reform belief in an increased participation by the citizen in government. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 453

Categorization

• SEED: Caro isolates a rhetorical tactic worth studying - when reformers dodge a weak point in their case, Moses charges at its heart and converts it. An essay could mine this as a persuasion technique.
• XREF: This anticipatory gleam of the later Moses - the man who reduces complexities to fundamentals through driving prose - connects to Caro’s forthcoming portrait of the report as ‘the summing up’ of New York reform, which then inverts into the consolidation Moses later exploits. — connects to: Oxford transformed Moses from florid poet into terse bureaucratic writer — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 229