Tony Sidaway wrote:
I like your idea of adopting the Economist house style, but a lot of kids are taught in schools to write unimaginably long, tedious essays on quite trivial subjects, so they have to learn how to trim out the waffle when they come to writing for real readers.
Jakob Nielsen's "Writing for the Web" is not ideal for this purpose (highlighted promotional keywords?), but it's a useful start.
http://www.useit.com/papers/webwriting/
- l,d.