the [DESCRIPTION] token contains everything that is entered in the description of the announcement. One of the "features" of the rich text editor (fck) is that it sometimes inserts paragraph marks around the discription. You can solve that by changing the template, and by changing the css of your skin or portal. You could change the template by putting a div around the discription:

<div class="CleanDescription">[DESCRIPTION]</div>

next add this to the css of your skin or portal.css:

.CleanDescription p {
    top-margin: 0px;
    bottom-margin:0px;
}

i am not sure what you mean by " I wanted to get access to [READMORE] so that I could remove the <p> tag that was included". ReadMore only generates a link to the linked file/page, it has nothing to do with the Description token

How can you modify the value the [ReadMore] token displays? Instead of "read more..." I would like it to say, "Click here to read more..."

Open this file \DesktopModules\Announcements\App_LocalResources\SharedResources.resx to change the read more link text