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Keep Writing Clean! Ten Ways to Avoid Substance Abuse

Published in STC Region 5 Conference Proceedings

By Jennifer Gibbs

This paper presents strategies to help novice and intermediate technical writers and technical communications managers achieve consistently good writing despite the demands of the fast-paced, results-driven business world. It highlights some common pitfalls and discusses a process-oriented approach to avoiding them.

Introduction

Ideally, a writer always has enough time to complete each phase of a project thoroughly. She conducts research and gathers information; develops, designs, and assesses an approach; and has at least two review cycles before the finished product is released. But who lives in this perfect world? As professional writers, the quality of our work can be compromised by cost and time parameters that are anything but ideal. Clients and bosses can add to these demands with feedback that is too vague or too copious and that is given to us too soon or too late to help us meet their goals.

Trapped by these pressures, even the best writers may find themselves reaching for the short-term comfort of clichés and jargon, indiscriminate copying-and-pasting, and other easy answers to the hard work of building well-written documents. Worse, what at first served as a quick fix for a single project may become a long-term addiction to bad writing habits.

Recognize the Warning Signs

What can you do if you or someone you love is sliding into the dark abyss of bad writing? As they say, awareness is half the battle. Here are some of the most common temptations that plague technical writers and specific suggestions for how to handle them:

Common Addictions
Symptoms	What it is	What to look for	How it hurts	Treatment
Speed Addiction	A commitment to fast results at any cost	Inconsistent usage, erratic sentence style, gaps in content development	Sloppy writing erodes credibility and can distort meaning.	Considering the long-term costs of miscuing readers can help slow it down.
Jargon Overload	Too much specialized language	Terms you can’t find in a college-level dictionary, anything with the suffix -ize	Jargon alienates stakeholders who aren’t experts in the field.	Scan text for jargon. Switch to general terms wherever meaning won’t be distorted (“used” instead of “utilized”).
Cliché Dependency	Reliance on expressions so overused, readers’ eyes glaze over	Any common pattern of words	Text loses contact with the reader.	Scan document for well-worn phrases. Replace with original alternatives.
Word Herding	Carrying text from a source straight into the document without shaping content and/or style	Sudden shifts in audience focus, vocabulary, sentence style, and/or topic perspective	Text sends mixed messages about its implicit and explicit intentions, confusing readers.	Take the time to overwrite the section so that it fits into the rest of the document smoothly.
Grammar Daze	Obliviousness to mangled syntax and other woes	Lack of agreement between parts of speech, inconsistent usage of tense and voice, misplaced modifiers, etc.	Text looks sloppy—worse, mistakes hamper effective communication.	Review major grammar rules from a handbook. Scan the entire document looking for one problem at a time.
Surface-level Haze	Insensibility to inconsistent and even incorrect usage	Illogical inconsistencies in capitalization and punctuation, lack of parallelism, etc.	Says that the writer can’t be trusted with details.	Scan the entire document looking for one problem at a time.
Deaf to the Music	Ignorance of the link between speaking, writing, and reading comprehension	Non-strategic use of alliteration, unvaried sentence length and patterns	Distracts the reader, interfering with the message.	Read aloud. Listen!
Blind to the View	Ignorance of how typography impacts communication	Poor choice of font type and size, over- or under- use of such features as italics, white space, color	Layout that fails to consider the audience’s needs is an obstacle to meeting those needs.	View document from various distances and angles, including upside down.
Rule Addiction	An inflexible approach to the conventions of language-based communication	Awkward but technically “correct” language used as though one rule fits all occasions	Can strike an inappropriate level of diction for a given document, alienating or distracting the reader.	Remember, ultimately what’s correct is whatever is most appropriate for a given context.

Ten Ways to Keep Writing Clean

Treatment of bad writing symptoms is a good first step, but long-term recovery of writing skills may require a lasting commitment to a healthier writing process. By practicing the following approach to projects whenever you can, you will sharpen your skills and be better able to weather even those situations when time, cost, and client demands pressure you to fall back into the dark world of Substance Abuse.

One: Know where you stand. Perform occasional quality assurance audits by reviewing past projects. Add your honest assessment of your writing strengths and weaknesses to a complete inventory of each new project’s parameters such as time and cost limitations, purpose, and audience.

Two: Arm yourself. Streamline writing time and focus your energies where they’ll count most by stocking your desk with essential tools such as desk references, model documents, contact lists, manuals for appropriate software, and style sheets from similar projects before the rush job comes in.

Three: Modify your expectations. At every stage, review the information you gathered about your audience and purpose. Compare the client’s expectations about the project’s content, methodology, and evaluation standards with yours. If necessary, adjust your expectations to fit the client’s. If this is not possible, discuss your concerns with your client to avoid delivering a shoddy product.

Four: Commit to a style guide. Don’t depend on cobbled-together memories from bygone English classes. Familiarize yourself with the top style manuals (and others if you write for a specialized field). Know which style (Chicago, MLA, APA, etc.) is appropriate for your project.

Five: Construct a style sheet or checklist. A style sheet captures decisions made about the text that are either not covered by or deviate from the agreed-upon style guide. The style sheet includes commitments to format choices as well as to other features specific to that document and/or client.

Six: Differentiate between editing and proofreading. Though it may seem counterintuitive, you can get better results in less time by conducting multiple passes through a document. Edit for substantive issues such as accurate content, strategic overall structure, and development separately from proofreading for sentence-level concerns such a spelling and punctuation. When time allows, select only one or two things to scan for at each pass. For rush jobs, try to have two separate passes—one for editing, one for proofreading—and an outside pair of eyes.

Seven: Know when to say H.A.L.T.! Self-helpers point out that we are most vulnerable to error when we are hungry, angry, lonely, or tired. Sometimes the way to deliver the best product by a deadline is to take strategically timed breaks that allow you to finish your project with fresh eyes.

Eight: Get Help. Collaborating formally or informally with other writers you respect can boost your own skills and motivation.

Nine: Read well, play well. One of the best ways to keep skills honed is to try a new word game or to read a well-written book on a topic you don’t write on. Look up unfamiliar words.

Ten: Remember you’re not alone. You’re trying to help readers understand something. Who they are and what they need to know should dictate every information design choice you make, from content to tone to layout and beyond. Come back to this principle often throughout each project to stay on track.

Conclusion

The point of good writing habits is not perfection—it’s effective communication, happy clients, and the satisfaction of a job well done. By periodically evaluating our approach to writing, we can prevent and even cure substance abuse.

Jennifer Gibbs is a project leader, writer, and editor with McKinnon-Mulherin.