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Front Page: Writing for everybody
Accountability for leaders
Bad words
Chicken Capitalized
Dashing punctuation
Editorial Assistance
Use a checklist
Alarmed quilts
© 2001 Analytic Services
Writing for Everybody
We tend to write for readers—for people who like to read. We like to use literary references, subtle distinctions, and humorous allusions.It’s easy for writers to forget that some people don’t like to read. For some, reading is a chore. Our job as writers or editors often requires us to communicate with them too—and with people who don’t have time to read everything we want to say. In his book Spread the Word (New York: Times Books, 1999), William Safire quoted President Clinton’s remarks on how to summarize his administration’s social policy:
“‘We were trying to think of what our bumper sticker would be,’ said the President at a luncheon, seeking to change the Administration line from ‘less shock, more
“‘I think our slogan would be there needs to be more reform and more social service support,’ Mr. Clinton said, ‘more attempts to build a safety net to deal with the consequences of reform, but not an attempt to slow down the reform effort.’ Some slogan.”
As Safire’s sarcasm emphasizes, clear communication often falls victim to wordiness and complexity. When a slogan is called for, a whole paragraph is ruled out.
As communicators, we may need to pass on information that affects everyone in a company, and those people may need that information in writing. That calls for clarity and simplicity. The compound sentence may be out of place. The nuance and metaphor may be distractions. We need simple declarative, interrogative, and imperative sentences.
Forms are a good example. Bulletins and announcements are others. The questions they ask and the information they convey need to be clear and unmistakable.
Some time ago, one of ANSER’s artists, Elaine Sapp, was asked to create signs that read, “Effective Feb. 1, 2000 ANSER employees will no longer be able to park in the designated spaces.” Forty of the signs were going to be posted in the garage. Elaine came to me and said, “This isn’t right.” She knew that we could do a better job of communicating the intended message. When she was done with them, the signs read, “No ANSER Parking.”
From time to time I’ve attended children’s church services. I’ve noticed that when the pastor simplifies the sermon to make it understandable for children, the adults seem to follow it better too. To communicate simply doesn’t have to mean leaving anything out. It means presenting the important points in order. It means stating exceptions clearly. It means not assuming too much prior knowledge on the part of the reader. It means presenting conclusions plainly, based on the information already presented. These are good rules for all writing that is meant to provide information.
—Steve Dunham
What we ought to be demanding is that our leaders speak better English, so that we know what they are talking about and, incidentally, so that they do.
—Edwin Newman, A Civil Tongue (Warner Books, 1976)
Bad Words
Asses is a bad word. So are posses, mange, polices, rouge, and theses. They are bad because they almost never are used on purpose in ANSER documents, but they turn up far too often and are easy to overlook. They are mistyped versions of assess, possess, manage, policies, rogue, and these. A spell check won’t catch them, and it’s easy to read them and not notice that they’re wrong.That’s why our quality check includes a search for these and a few other bad words, such as hat instead of that and treat instead of threat. (One of our favorite typos, which we made into a cookie jar label, was bio-warfare treats.)
It’s a good idea to make a list of mistyped words that appear often in your documents and search for them before printing a file or publishing it. The search takes only a minute and can save you from embarrassing mistakes. We’ve seen asses in a 
Chicken-or-Egg Capitalization
Do you ever go home, turn on the Air Conditioning, put a tape into a Video Cassette Recorder, and watch a movie on TeleVision? You shouldn’t. Because those are all common nouns and shouldn’t be capitalized.Initials (such as AC, VCR, and TV) don’t necessarily stand for proper nouns, though they often do: NY, YMCA, USAF. A common fault in technical writing is to capitalize phrases such as commercial off-the-shelf and very high frequency because their initials are capitalized. Another common mistake is to assume that the same letters must be capitalized as in the abbreviation—Extensible Markup Language, for example is abbreviated XML, but the first word is Extensible, not eXtensible, as it is sometimes written.
Initials for new words tend to start out as all capitals. The initials may eventually see common use in lower case (such as mph) or, if they form an acronym (a pronounceable word), even make it into the dictionary (as in the case of radar). Even some acronyms that look like proper nouns, such as loran, have made it into the dictionary as common nouns. Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 10th edition, says that the word loran has been in use since 1932.
It would be simple but simplistic to assume that the words come first and are later shortened; in many cases words are chosen because they will yield a catchy acronym. Take JOVIAL (Joules’ own version of international algorithmic language). It’s hard to believe that the words own version would be used in the name if they weren’t needed to compose the acronym JOVIAL (it could just as well have been called “Joules’ international algorithmic language”). In other cases, the initials have been force-fit to the words, again in pursuit of a catchy acronym—UFO for “UHF Follow-On” is an example. In these cases, the egg seems to have hatched the chicken—or did the chicken lay the egg?
On, Dasher
Dashes are everywhere—though sometimes not where they belong, and often under strength. The two most common dashes are the em dash and the en dash, so called because they are the width of a capital M and a capital N, respectively: — and –. Em dashes are used for separating groups of words—especially words that could be set off by parentheses—and therefore em dashes often show up in pairs. In typewriting, a pair of hyphens substituted for an em dash.
Hyphens join words; em dashes separate them. En dashes do both, as in “the
En dashes have risen from obscurity. (Associated Press and Government Printing Office styles don’t use them and would have “New York-Chicago.”) En dashes have been pressed into service where their big brothers belong, frequently with spaces to help them shoulder aside the words they’re not quite strong enough to separate. Instead of “Use em dashes—they’re stronger,” you might see “Use en dashes–they’re smaller and must be cheaper.” As you can see, that en dash isn’t big enough to hold apart two independent clauses. You might see an attempt to compensate in the form of “Use en dashes plus spaces – en dashes are probably cheaper and the spaces are free.”
Although whether to add spaces around em dashes is a matter of typographical style — some major publishers do so — in practice it can cause problems. Programs such as Microsoft Word, Adobe PageMaker, and QuarkXPress are set up to keep an em dash with the preceding word when an em dash falls at the end of a line. Because an em dash represents a major break in a sentence, it’s polite to let the reader know right away, and not wait till the beginning of the next line. If the dash is preceded by a space, however, the programs just mentioned will let the dash slip to the next line. You could use nonbreaking spaces, but that does add extra work.
Words Into Type (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1974) has an excellent discussion of dashes and their uses.
One final tip: If you place dashes in PowerPoint using Insert Symbol, they appear in the default font and size: 24-point Times New Roman. If you use the Character Map keyboard shortcut (Alt +
Editorial Assistance
Create a Checklist
At one job, although we had edited and proofread the magazine pages, once the film was ready and the matchprints made, we would find errors so bad that we had to pay for remaking the film. This happened more than once. It was embarrassing and costly.Then we did something right that saved our pride and saved the magazine a lot of money. At a desktop publishing expo, I and one of my assistant editors went to a workshop created by Editorial Experts, now known as EEI Communications. When we left, we were kicking ourselves for not thinking of it on our own, but grateful for learning about an obvious editorial tool: the checklist.
The reason our magazine pages had so many errors was that we were merely reading them. Unfortunately, so many things can go wrong in writing and layout that it isn’t possible to notice everything merely by reading. If you want to find all the errors, you need to check for some items individually. For example, if
We’ve included the ANSER Publications checklist in this issue. We suggest that you take it and modify it for your own use, or create one especially for your needs. Expect it to make a big difference.
—Steve Dunham
“Quilts are alarmed”—warning sign at the Renwick Gallery, Washington, DC. Don’t touch a worried quilt—it might bite.