Breaking the Second Rule of Tech Writing

(The first rule is to be clear.) Last speech, on the TV:

The second rule is to be concise. That means no more words than necessary. (But all the words that are necessary.) I remember, as a kid, watching a conversation in a movie about Joel Chandler Harris. Joel is told by his mentor that “if you can take out a word and not change the meaning, take it out.”

“Day” is a lot more concise than “24-hour time period.” duh

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Yes, yes, the technical term is concision, but that’s not the word people use, except for us pretentious professionals. The word means to take out unnecessary words. Taking out the three unnecessary words here solves two problems. First panel:

Take out “was it that” and you have a much cleaner sentence, and it fixes two errors.

• Use “who,” not “that” when you refer to people.
• “It,” as spoken in the sentence, is a meaningless predicate nominative. Bad.

So just ask, “Who said ‘I’m not young enough to know everything?’ “

First the comic:

Maybe he means something like “vivid.” (What do you think?) On the other hand, maybe he’s listing synonyms for “bucket.” I suspect “bucket” has more than two synonyms, though. Maybe he should say that the bucket list is short!

Concise means just enough words, and no extra words. He needs only one word, and it’s not a list.

A pleonasm is an unnecessary word in a sentence. An example of a word that’s frequently unnecessary is “different.” For example, take a look at this sentence from an article on using hydrogen to create electricity:

“This process involved a lot of different steps, and at each step we felt we were making progress, which kept us motivated,” Grinter told New Atlas.

https://newatlas.com/science/clean-energy-electricity-produced-air

But sometimes “different” is necessary. Here’s another sentence from the same article:

It’s certainly not the first surprise new finding to come from a different field of study.

Why is “different” okay here, but not in that first sentence? The difference is the number of things you’re comparing. “Lots of steps” is the same as “lots of different steps,” but when you compare only two things, “different” is helpful. “A field of study” is not the same as “a different field of study.”

So think when you write! Leave out those extra words. Concise is nice.

To make this post a bit less poring, here’s a picture from the article:

First speech bubble.

It’s not “all of the sudden,” it’s “all of a sudden.” (I’m not even sure what the derivation of this expression is.)

But that’s not even the main lesson here. Be concise! Say “suddenly”!

Harrumpf.