First impressions or assumptions based on the words we use

I love the Nielsen Norman Group articles. Their tag line summarizes their style of writing well: “Evidence-Based User Experience Research, Training, and Consulting.” Their articles are focused, on a single topic, and they always include inline links to other articles they are referring to or building off of. My favorite part of their articles, when they include it, is the references section at the bottom. I’d bet most people skip that section, but I always find the gems of evidence-based research there. Today’s article was no exception.

Hoa Loranger posted the article, “Cringeworthy Words to Cut from Online Copy,” and the references section was a pleasant surprise for me. The article itself reports personal choices of “cringeworthy” words (such as utilize, enables, and very) — what a great word cringeworthy is to choose to use here, to convey the emotion behind certain words, to convey how readers make assumptions based on the words we use. Within the introduction and the five choices are links to other NN/g articles that back up her choices. (I encourage you to explore all of the articles linked to in this one.)

When I got to the conclusion and saw the reference, I did not expect to find an article that was published in Applied Cognitive Psychology journal:

Oppenheimer, D. M.(2006). Consequences of erudite vernacular utilized irrespective of necessity: Problems with using long words needlessly. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 20, 139-156.

(I found a PDF of this journal article from a handy-dandy Google search.)

How could I not go and try to read a journal article with such an appropriate title and subtitle? I geeked out as I read through the journal article, which described 5 different experiments that were performed at Stanford University. The net results stated: “needless complexity leads to negative evaluations” in particular about the author’s intelligence. While many people often use more complex words in an attempt to sound more intelligent, these experiments showed that the opposite first impression occurred. Oppenheimer does acknowledge that the experiments were limited to a student population, and that complex words might not always be problematic if the intended audience were more likely to readily understand those complex words.

Once again, we are brought back around to two basic guiding principles of technical communication: (1) know your audience and (2) keep it simple.

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Standard English is built from agreed-upon conventions

I’m busily preparing a course for the UCSC Silicon Valley Extension Technical Communication certificate program. It is “Grammar and Style for Technical Communicators.” I’ve chosen three (yes, three!) textbooks, and I continue to find wonderful articles across the bloggersphere and twittersphere that I keep adding to the introduction area. I do realize that most of the students who sign up for this class are doing so only because it is one of the required courses before they can take other courses in the certificate program. I guess I am hopeful that the students might enjoy discussing or debating the ideas behind the pedantic arguments about grammar (which are often not really about grammar, but about style, but let’s not digress and go there).

One of my favorite blogs about grammar is the Lingua Franca blog on the Chronicle of Higher Education site. A blog post from March 2015 made its way around the Twittersphere recently called “Talking About Grammar Pedantry.” Unfortunately, this blog has been removed from the site, and so the blog post is no longer available (and I learned about archive.today too late to grab this great post!). It is a wonderful essay about Standard English. This quote from the post is at the heart of my grammar course:

Standard English, like all standard languages, can serve as a kind of lingua franca, especially in writing, for people who use different dialects. It also provides a target for speakers learning English as a second or foreign language. The problems emerge when standard English gets mistakenly equated with “the only kind of good/right/correct English.”

I applaud Anne Curzan’s view that we should avoid “proper” or “correct” modifiers for English. Also, the author likes to use the word “conventions” instead of “rules,” to bring the conversation away from the polarization that comes from engaging in grammar pedantry. Standard English is an agreed upon set of conventions for the written word such that we can write, edit, revise, and potentially translate the information quickly and easily. And another great quote from the post about pedantry:

What a good usage guide can do is help us understand and effectively navigate those distinctions to achieve our own purposes as speakers and writers without ill-founded and sometimes snobbish pedantry.

To be a good technical communicator — be that a technical writer or a technical editor — you must be able to understand style guides and usage guides for your products and communications. I think that’s why I assigned three different textbooks for my course; I want my students to see how differently authors organize the grammatical and stylistic conventions for producing clear communication. You encounter and use many different style and usage guides, so having a solid foundation in grammar and style is a key to your success as a technical communicator.

The value of edit summaries

After you complete an edit, do you take the time to review your edits as a whole and write an edit summary for the author? Or, is this (or some part of this) just part of your email that you communicate with the author?

To create a non-adversarial relationship with your author, you need to help your edits be considered more openly so that more of your suggested changes will be accepted and made. Editing is a critical process, and it is hard to have your writing criticized. As much as we editors might want our authors to believe that we are partners in producing the best possible information, the undercurrent of criticism will always be there. By taking the time to write 3 short sentences that summarize your edits, and trying to call out one positive element to the writing, you can build that partnership.

I was struck by An American Editor’s blog post about “trigger warnings,” and his musings about whether he should provide them to his authors. He doesn’t feel that we should need to provide them, but I think they can help build relationships and help more of our work be accepted and incorporated.

Happy editing everyone!

2015 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2015 annual report for my blog.

Here's an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 2,000 times in 2015. If it were a cable car, it would take about 33 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

Many hats…but one love of technical editing

About a year ago, I wrote a post about where I was taking my blog — I was widening the scope to include more than just technical editing topics as my very first post suggested.

I did post on a much broader set of topics in 2015, but my technical editing topics continue to be the most viewed and most popular. I’m thrilled that one of my first posts, “Defining technical editing,” continues to be my most viewed blog post, year after year (I bet it is on a syllabus in some course somewhere!). As I prepare to teach a grammar course (for students in techcomm programs), I review and muse upon my posts this year and previous years about just how much grammar technical editors need to know. I hope to blog about the course in the new year.

One of my favorite posts this year was “10 basics every communicator needs.” It was based on an article about what journalists need today, but I applied the basics to the many hats we wear. I wrote a few posts like that — taking something targeted to one area and applying it or showing how to apply it to my own area. Because I changed jobs this year, and I no longer work in an information development department on product documentation, I started broadening my reading to even beyond techcomm topics — to content marketing. Even now, even after reading and writing about content marketing, I still have trouble accepting or thinking about what I do as content marketing.

I hope I get into the groove of posting regularly again, like I did at the start of 2015. I hope you all continue to enjoy the random ruminations of this editor at heart who enjoys wearing many hats.