Overview

If they are not readable, documents will not meet their aims no matter how good the content may be. Like any other task you are asked to perform at work, workplace writing calls for efficiency. Inefficient writing makes your message unclear and makes the reader work harder than is necessary to understand that message. Just as in other tasks, inefficient writing costs time and money. Clear writing means more than correct use of grammar, punctuation, and spelling. Clear writing possesses clarity, conciseness, fluency, exactitude, and an appropriate tone.

A readable style calls for sentences that can be understood in just one reading. A lack of clarity results in ambiguous meanings that confuse the reader. Creating a wordy document, repeating the same points (repetition), repeating points using different words (redundancy), and using complex words when one simple word would suffice all contribute to wordiness. Construct sentences fluently to allow your reader to easily follow what you are saying. Also, choose the exact word to communicate your meaning to your audience.

This chapter has a wealth of practical and prescriptive rules that can be applied right away. Take them to heart. For every piece of advice given, many of us can find terrible examples in professional documents that violate that advice. The common assumption of most readers is that most technical writing is simply bad writing. Complaints are almost universal, which is why there are textbooks like this.

Even so, rules themselves are made to be broken, and more often than you may think. Embedded in every rule given in this chapter, in words like 'clear,' and 'concise', are cultural assumptions. What is clear and concise in one culture may be clear as mud in another. We live in a world of global and cross-cultural communication. Within that world, Americans have the worst reputation for assuming that the entire world is defined by their cultural conventions, reading styles, and vocabulary. The United States may hold the majority of the world's wealth, but the majority of people on earth do not speak English and most certainly were not raised with Western cultural assumptions.

Why should that matter to you? Perhaps you have no intention of being thrust unwillingly into the global village. Perhaps your hometown suits you just fine. A job and a family and the nearest horizon may be all to which you really aspire.

Time to wake up and smell the Brazilian coffee. There is hardly an industry in the U.S. that is not directly connected to global suppliers in one way or another. If not getting materials or parts from cheap labor in third world countries, then hometown firms are perhaps competing with ventures in those countries who use or exploit third world labor. Telecommunications means your programming firm could be running 24-hour shifts, with half the programmers working days in the U.S. and the other half working days in India (at half the wages of U.S. programmers).

In the end, we will all be forced out of the comfortable discourse conventions of American ethnocentricism, to understand what clarity means in Asian cultures, what the work week and production schedules are in the European Union, and to be able to keep from offending Muslim petroleum engineers in the Middle East by scheduling a teleconference during the call to prayer.