Powerful Points from "Style", Part 6

I’ve discussed noun chains in a previous posting (http://wordsontheline.blogspot.com/2007/02/unlink-that-noun-chain.html). Noun chains (i.e., a succession of nouns in a sentence) cause reading challenges and require careful editing. Here’s an example:

This is the quality assurance department intervention project focus group completion report.

A nine-word noun chain—that’s a record! Such phrases may have some vaguely abstract meaning to the person who wrote it, but it is utterly ambiguous to anyone trying to understand it.

Joseph M. Williams walks his readers through a useful case study on page 91 of Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace, urging rewrites of such phrases by reversing their order. His advice would work in this case. Let’s start with the quality assurance group and then work backwards: focus group, then pull completion report, and finally intervention project, with a couple extra words for clarity. In this case the 14-word second draft is an improvement over the more concise but much foggier 12-word first draft:

The quality assurance department’s focus group presents this completion report on the intervention project.

Powerful Points from "Style", Part 5

Here’s a commonly asked question about writing at work: Should I use I or we when writing in formal contexts such as academic papers, technical reports, scientific abstracts, or legal briefs? If you’d ask those who have been browbeaten by their bosses into avoiding personal pronouns, they’d have you believe that this concern is a matter of company policy or law.

It is not. Using personal pronouns is an issue of preference, plain and simple. Those who would argue to the contrary would have to explain why they use the just-as-personal pronouns you and they, as in the following sentences typical of scientific and technical writing:

• Click on the link below to log in. (The you is understood here.)
• Clients may call the help desk whenever they have questions.

Using personal pronouns is a sure way of assigning responsibility for actions and achieving clarity. On page 88 of Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace, Joseph M. Williams notes, “The first person I and we appear in much scholarly prose. … When you are referring to some act of your own writing or thinking, the first person is entirely appropriate.”

Powerful Points from “Style”, Part 4

Passive voice is such a contentious writing issue among higher-level managers in the organizations where I deliver training workshops. Using the passive voice is not an issue of right or wrong but of style—how a writer wants to come across to the readers. So we have a choice:

Passive: Nine anonymous letters were mailed to me.
Active: I received nine anonymous letters.

Passive: Veronica was promoted.
Active: Management promoted Veronica.

Passive: The cause of the problem is unknown.
Active: The investigators do not know the cause of the problem.

Here’s what Joseph M. Williams has to say on the topic on page 80 in Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace:

Choose the passive voice when you don’t know who did it, your readers don’t care who did it, or you don’t want them to know who did it.

Well said. The choice is yours, but remember—active voice is generally more powerful, clear, and concise.


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Powerful Points from “Style”, Part 3

The nonsexist general pronoun he or she causes all kinds of awkward problems. Joseph M. Williams agrees in Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace. On page 35, he writes:

If we reject he as a generic pronoun because it is sexist and they because careful readers consider it ungrammatical, we are left with either a clumsily intrusive he or she, a substantially worse he/she, or the worst s/he.

Obviously, the grammar gods who decided that he or she would work as a rule flinched when they realized that the following sentence would be considered grammatically correct:

Any employee who does not have his or her handbook should ask his or her manager to get one for him or her because he or she will find answers to most questions about responsibilities and benefits he or she may have.

We can eliminate this problem by not using the general pronoun, choosing plurals, and finding ways around using any pronoun altogether:

Employees who do not have the handbook should ask their manager to get one because it answers most questions responsibilities and benefits.

Besides eliminating the awkwardness of the original, the second draft reduces the word count from 41 to 21.


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Powerful Points from "Style", Part 2

In Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace, sixth edition (New York: Longman, 2000), author Joseph M. Williams makes a good case for the foolhardiness of slavishly abiding by every grammar rule. Many grammar rules are beloved and cited endlessly by self-proclaimed grammar experts who themselves have limited writing experience. Williams divides many of these rules into two categories: folklore and options.

Which rules fall under folklore? Beginning a sentence with but, and, or because and fretting over the difference between that and which. And what are the optional rules? Splitting an infinite, shall vs. will, and who vs. whom.

Of course, it wouldn’t hurt to know the rules before breaking them, but Williams’s points are reasonable enough. After all, rarely would any of these issues have an effect on meaning.


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Powerful Points from "Style", Part 1

Serious writing students of the business, academic, or professional ilk should read Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace, sixth edition, by Joseph M. Williams (New York: Longman, 2000). Williams renders far more than ten lessons in his cogent essays on fluent, clear, and purposeful writing. One of my favorites is this:

(The) First Principle of Writing: We write well when we would willingly experience what our readers do when they read what we’ve written. That puts a burden on us as writers to imagine ourselves as readers.

I could not agree more. I frequently see people criticize their coworkers’ writing and then commit errors even more grievous. Williams’s observation is one of many excellent ones in his book, so I will touch upon a few more in the next six posts.


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