Writing Tips 4

When should you use the present tense?

The rule: In technical documentation, use the present to indicate customary behavior, no matter when it happens.

Examples:

• When true, the statement indicates acceptance; when false, it indicates rejection
• When you press Enter, the window appears
• Whenever I start to get hungry, I eat!
• Tomorrow I go to the dentist
• Every day I get up before 6:00

When can you use the future?

• When you want to be vague: Someday we will get married
• When the time is important: Tomorrow I will go to the dentist, but the next day I won’t
• For a command: You will clean your room! (In military tech writing they use “shall.”)

Subscribe to this blog's RSS feed

This is a mistake I see in documents that try to sound formal.

The rule: use “per,” not “as per.”

• “Per” means “according to.”
• “As per” is a pretensiousism. We don’t say “as according to.” Never say this unless you want to sound pretentious.

Example:

• “Carry out the instructions per the manual” means “follow the instructions according to the manual.”
• Sometimes “as” means “as if.” In other words, “only pretending.” Do you want to say “Follow the instructions as if you were following the manual”? I don’t think so.

More from my days at Bank of America.

Should you use “if,” or “whether”?

• “If” says that the event just mentioned might happen
• “Whether” says which event that follows will happen; it always says or implies “or not”

Example using “if”

“Send me a message to tell me if the bank was robbed”

• “The message appears if the bank was robbed; Otherwise, there’s no message
•  The existence of the event determines what happens.

Example using “whether”

“Tell me whether (or not) the bank was robbed”

• “The message tells you about the existence or non-existence of the robbery
• You get either “the bank was robbed” or you get “the bank was not robbed.”

So—

• “If” applies to what came before, and tells of existence
• “Whether” applies to what follows, and shows a choice

Hmm. What would be a good illustration showing this distinction?

A while back I worked at Bank of America. My area had a lot of folks for whom English was their second language. I prepared a series of writing tips for them. Here is the first one:

Should you use “like” or “such as”?

• “Like” means “similar to, but not exact”
• “Such as” means “here’s an actual example”

Bad: “…lines of business like consumer banking and small business banking.”
This means something similar to these, but not actually them.

Good: “…lines of business such as consumer banking and small business banking.”
“Consumer” and “small business” are actual examples, the real thing.

So—When you want to give an example of the real thing, use “such as,” even though it’s slightly longer than “like.”

I guess I don’t really need to comment. It’s all true.

Similes compare things, metaphors say something is something else.