--- a/NEWS
+++ b/NEWS
@@ -5,15 +5,15 @@
 
  ** IMPORTANT note about binary incompatibility in this release:
 
-    The original goal was to ensure binary compatibility for all 3.4.x
-    releases but this is impossible for the 3.4.1 release due to a bug
-    in the way shared libraries were built in Octave 3.4.0.  Because of
-    this bug, .oct files built for Octave 3.4.0 must be recompiled
-    before they will work with Octave 3.4.1.
+    Binary compatibility for all 3.4.x releases was originally planned,
+    but this is impossible for the 3.4.1 release due to a bug in the way
+    shared libraries were built in Octave 3.4.0.  Because of this bug,
+    .oct files built for Octave 3.4.0 must be recompiled before they
+    will work with Octave 3.4.1.
 
     Given that there would be binary incompatibilities with shared
-    libraries going from Octave 3.4.0 to 3.4.1, we also made the
-    following incompatible changes in this release:
+    libraries going from Octave 3.4.0 to 3.4.1, the following
+    incompatible changes were also made in this release:
 
       * The Perl Compatible Regular Expression (PCRE) library is now
         required to build Octave.
@@ -22,8 +22,8 @@
         subdirectories of $libdir instead of $libexecdir.
 
     Any future Octave 3.4.x release versions should remain binary
-    compatible with Octave 3.4.1 as we are now using proper library
-    versioning as recommended by the libtool manual.
+    compatible with Octave 3.4.1 as proper library versioning is now
+    being used as recommended by the libtool manual.
 
  ** The following functions have been deprecated in Octave 3.4.1 and will
     be removed from Octave 3.8 (or whatever version is the second major