Neologisms

First the comic, then the comments.

A neologism is a word you make up. Literally, the term means “new word.”

Here’s the rule about neologisms: If you’re a native speaker, you can make up words all you want. The presumption is that you did it on purpose. But if you’re not a native speaker and you say a word that doesn’t exist, people will snicker at you because you made a mistake!

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No doubt you know that words can have more than one meaning. You might not have considered that context is the key for deciding which meaning is appropriate.

Here we have five meanings of “two” in an ambiguous context. Try not to do this in your writing.

So: Consider your context!

Good expository writing is concise—all the necessary words, but no more. Redundancy is extra words that you don’t need. Those extra words say what you already said.

Here are a couple sentences from a NASA press release. I’m a bit ashamed to reveal the source because the press release contains a bunch of bad writing (including carelessness: “…including released of water vapor.”)

These two sentences each contain a redundancy:

The ongoing examination of Bennu – and its sample that will eventually be returned to Earth – could potentially shed light on why this intriguing phenomenon is occurring.

Many of the ejected particles are small enough to be collected by the spacecraft’s sampling mechanism, meaning that the returned sample may possibly contain some material that was ejected and returned to Bennu’s surface.

Here’s the rule, dating back at least as far as Joel Chandler Harris:

If you can leave a word out, leave it out.

PS—I ran into a comic that makes the point, too:

When you write instructions, be sure to get them right:

• Don’t leave anything out
• Get the instructions in order!

Notes, by the way, generally go before the instructions. They give context.

Two rules of thumb:

• Test all instructions! If the reader gets it wrong, the problem is with the instructions.
• Bad documentation must not be justified with the excuse that the reader will figure it out.

Ignore the politics, and ignore that the language is spoken instead of written. This is an excellent (if somewhat hyperbolic) message about adjusting how you write to match whoever reads what you write.