Thursday, March 24, 2005
Writing tightly
When writing a manual (or anything else), you do not want to be wordy. But I far too often find a lot of wordiness in documentation that I take over. Much of it is caused by redundant writing, like this:
I can understand a sentence like that creeping into a first draft, but it's inexcusable in a published manual. Especially a published manual that has been released more than twice. That gaffe should have been caught during the editing process -- at the very least, during a peer edit.
Admittedly, the ability to write tightly isn't easy to acquire. It takes work. But the effort spent to master that ability will pay off in the long run.
You can search your folders for all media of a specific type. That is, you can search the folders for all images, audio files, video clips, or documents.Why not just write "You can search your folders for images, audio files, video clips, or documents"? That little re-write effectively trimmed the sentence in half.
I can understand a sentence like that creeping into a first draft, but it's inexcusable in a published manual. Especially a published manual that has been released more than twice. That gaffe should have been caught during the editing process -- at the very least, during a peer edit.
Admittedly, the ability to write tightly isn't easy to acquire. It takes work. But the effort spent to master that ability will pay off in the long run.
