Posts Tagged ‘English’

© 2010 Ugur Akinci “Variance” is an important concept in statistics and plays a crucial role in technical documentation as well. Without getting too technical about it: “variance” denotes the way the values of a set of elements vary around a central mean value. Imagine you weighing a hundred marbles. Let’s say the arithmetic-mean weight…

© 2010 Ugur Akinci Technique: Split long sentences into shorter and simpler ones Here is a sure-fire method to split your long sentences into shorter and more easily understandable ones: Split your sentences at conjunctions like “and”, “or”, “while”, “however”, “although” etc. Those are the connection points where one clause is linked to another. By…

© 2010 Ugur Akinci Technical writing has to be clear, linear, and logical. Technique:  Write in simple sentences that anybody can understand Avoid compound sentences with multiple clauses. Here is the most basic sentence structure in English: SUBJECT + VERB + OBJECT If a sentence does not have this structure, try to rearrange the components…

© 2010 Ugur Akinci Technical writing needs to be correct, before anything else. This is the MOST IMPORTANT sine qua non condition of all technical writing. If a technical document is incorrect, it’s value is zero, nil, zilch. The rest doesn’t matter. Incorrect technical writing creates confusion, misinformation, and even dangerous mistakes and disasters. Technique…

© 2010 Ugur Akinci Technical writing fails when it tries to become “fine writing” or “creative writing.” Why? Because one of the main tools of “fine writing” is attributing human-like qualities to non-human actors and agents. That’s a definite taboo in technical documentation. (“Anthropomorphizing” is the $100-word that says the same thing.) For example you…

Technical writing needs to be objective. It should describe objects the properties of which we can measure quantitatively. COROLLARY: When different people read a technical description, they should be able to perform identical tasks and obtain identical results. And for that to happen, the words you use must not be open to wide-raging interpretations. One…

© 2010 Ugur Akinci As a technical writer you are supposed to tell your readers what to do and how to accomplish specific tasks. It would not be an exaggeration to say that your task, in essence, is to show them “how the world works and how to act correctly when the situation demands it.”…