Rewrite the following sentence, replacing the inflated diction with clear, straightforward words.The responses of the public to the survey revealed...

Being able to write concisely is a great skill.  While
it's great to have a big vocabulary, there's no reason to use complex or long words when
simple ones will do!

First, rewwrite the roundabout
prepositional phrases. Instead of "responses of the public", try "the public's
responses", and rather than "responses...to the survey", try "survey responses".  That
gets us to The public's survey responses; four words replace eight,
without losing meaning. In fact, we can probably get rid of "the public's", too because
it's too vague to add anything substantial to the picture.  Survey
responses conveys the same information.

Next,
let's replace phrases with one-word synonyms wherever possible. "Lack of safety" might
be replaced with "danger", and we could substitute "the streets" for "public
thoroughfares".  If we made those changes, we'd have Survey responses revealed
growing concern about danger on the streets. Overall, we've reduced the
original sentence's 21 words to 10, and simplified the inflated phrasing and vocabulary
("public thoroughfares") into plain English.