TechWhirl (TECHWR-L) is a resource for technical writing and technical communications professionals of all experience levels and in all industries to share their experiences and acquire information.
For two decades, technical communicators have turned to TechWhirl to ask and answer questions about the always-changing world of technical communications, such as tools, skills, career paths, methodologies, and emerging industries. The TechWhirl Archives and magazine, created for, by and about technical writers, offer a wealth of knowledge to everyone with an interest in any aspect of technical communications.
Ed Hull, Chris Horton, etc comment on brevity:
> Keeping a text short and to-the-point is difficult, time consuming
> and expensive for the writer but it saves the reader a lot. Assuming
> that there are many more readers than writers the net result should be
> time and money saving
My old prof referred to this as the principles of writer and reader
economy. (He probably took this from some other deep thinker). Basically,
the idea is that the more work the writer spends on a piece, the less
work the reader eventually has to do, whereas the less work the writer
does,
the more work required of the reader, and the greater the chance the
reader will *quit*.
It's astoundingly obvious, and doesn't really help in many practical
situations, but it can be a useful notion when teaching writing. One
point where I used it when a TA was in explaining why expletives and
weak verbs should be replaced when possible.
I told them "sure, you start your sentence, you don't know precisely where
it's going, so you begin with a few filler words - 'There are many...'.
Eventually you end up with a thought. You've made it easy on yourself by
using these stock phrases and fillers. It's writer economy. But the
sentence
is hard to read; it's inefficient. So now you've got to go back and do more
work - recasting the sentence to eliminate the expletives, replacing weak
verbs with strong ones, identifying the true subject of the sentence. The
sentence is easier to read now. You've done the work of cleaning up your
writing so your reader doesn't have to. It's reader economy."
I miss teaching.
Pete Kloppenburg - pkloppen -at- certicom -dot- com
Technical Writer
Certicom Corp
Mississauga, Ontario,
Canada http://www.certicom.com
TECHWR-L (Technical Communication) List Information: To send a message
to 2500+ readers, e-mail to TECHWR-L -at- LISTSERV -dot- OKSTATE -dot- EDU -dot- Send commands
to LISTSERV -at- LISTSERV -dot- OKSTATE -dot- EDU (e.g. HELP or SIGNOFF TECHWR-L).
Search the archives at http://www.documentation.com/ or search and
browse the archives at http://listserv.okstate.edu/archives/techwr-l.html
