11 Tips for Better IT Writing
“Excellent written communication skills” is a staple of IT job ads (and many other industries), but few employers seem to insist on this particular point, judging from the average written work. According to the Houston Chronicle, “When employers specify that excellent written communication skills are an essential qualification, they are looking for candidates who can demonstrate their ability to write clearly, succinctly and in a manner that appeals to a wide audience.” Often, just a few changes can turn lousy writing into passable writing and mediocre writing into good writing. Here are 11 tips—in no particular order—that can help you develop or improve your skills in this area.
Use the active voice. Passive voice is the darling of wishy-washy writers and people who want to buck responsibility. Instead of taking the blame by saying “I didn’t complete the project on time” (an example of the active voice), many will subtly throw blame into the ether by saying “The project didn’t get completed on time.” Passive voice is often awkward and wordier than active voice. For instance, “X was done by Y” can be replaced by the punchier “Y did X.” Some cases of passive voice are more subtle, such as “There are three things you need to be aware of.” In the active voice, the sentence gets to the point much quicker: “You need to be aware of three things.” (And no, a preposition at the end of a sentence is not wrong, but it may be undesirable; in this example, the active voice avoids the issue entirely.)
Keep your style boring. No, I didn’t say your writing should sound robotic, nor did I say your content should be boring. What I mean is you need not try to artificially spice up your prose with fancy words, unorthodox sentence constructions and other gimmicks designed to bring attention to you, the writer, rather than the ideas you’re trying to convey. Time-tested strategies such as varying sentence lengths, avoiding rhyme and using a variety of words to limit repetition are certainly helpful, but don’t use professional works as an opportunity to test a new literary device. Focus on the content, not yourself, and do so by implementing a vanilla style.
Hyphenate compound adjectives to promote clarity. Although it’s easy to go overboard with hyphens, they are a tool that you can and should use when necessary. In particular, a series of adjectives (or other words functioning as adjectives) may be ambiguous; a hyphen can often clarify the situation. For example, if a new server design offers “more beneficial features” compared with a previous design, is it offering more features that are beneficial, or features that are more beneficial? The use of a hyphen (“more-beneficial features”) shows that the first adjective modifies the second, whereas the absence of the hyphen (“more beneficial features”) shows that the first adjective modifies the noun. Mastering this technique is tough, but if you just address the most egregious cases, your writing will be clearer.
Read your work aloud. Okay, you may want to find some privacy before trying this step. But often, you’ll find that what you thought was a perfectly reasonable sentence is actually far too long or too convoluted to sound natural when read aloud. And if so, a reader may well stumble also. By reading the work aloud, you will likely notice sentences that ramble on or that make less sense than you originally thought. If your writing sounds good when spoken, it’s probably in decent shape.
Get help. Careful editing of every idle email is probably overkill. For important works, however, get someone else to review your writing—even if he or she doesn’t know the subject matter. Hiring a professional editor may be unnecessary in many cases, but a second opinion from a trusted adviser can be almost as beneficial. Often, you may understand what you’re saying in some work, whereas a reader will be completely lost. Honest feedback helps you avoid this problem.
Invest in a style guide. If you write a lot, a style guide can be a helpful resource to ensure that your prose is consistent and defensible. One popular example is the Chicago Manual of Style (currently in its sixteenth edition). Such books provide guidance on all sorts of matters ranging from basic grammar to dealing with mathematical expressions to commonly misused terms and more.
Avoid capitalizing every noun you see. IT writers love to capitalize terms, particularly if they later abbreviate them. Thus, service-level agreements (SLAs) become Service-Level Agreements, virtual machines (VMs) become Virtual Machines and so on. Generally, only proper nouns require capitals—that is, for example, names (e.g., John, Cisco and Kindle Fire) and specific places (e.g., Paris, Russia and Nebraska, but not “the north”).
Wherever possible, delete words. If the meaning of a particular sentence can survive deletion of a word or phrase, then remove the excess verbiage. A classic example is “going forward,” which is tacked onto sentences everywhere but serves absolutely no useful purpose. In the sentence “He went ahead and told the CIO about the security problems,” “went ahead and” is gratuitous. “He told the CIO about the security problems” is sufficient. Be ruthless in this regard; most readers want information in as brief a format as possible, so save them time by removing unneeded words.
Limit your prepositions. “One of the major problems in bad writing is the use of too many prepositions by people in the IT industry.” Or, perhaps, “Using too many prepositions is a major problem in bad IT writing.” Note in the first sentence how the many prepositions (five) lengthen the thought and make it extremely difficult to follow (and the passive voice is no help, either). The second sentence is brief, to the point and, uncoincidentally, uses only one preposition. Learning to spot and correct preposition overuse takes practice, but it’s worth the effort.
Be positive. Where practical, avoid making negative statements. For instance, rather than saying “The software was not flexible enough,” try something like “The software was too inflexible.” By eliminating the negative, you make the sentence more direct and less taxing on the reader’s attention. You may also be able to eliminate a word or two. Numerous negative assertions can become difficult to follow, particularly if they appear in the same sentence or the same line of thought.
Break the rules rather than write something ghastly. Echoing George Orwell’s last rule of writing, refrain from becoming too much of a stickler. Sometimes, for instance, eliminating a preposition, using a positive construction or employing the active voice makes for an unnatural or otherwise distracting sentence. If your adherence to rules sounds forced, the reader will probably notice. The ultimate goal is to write clearly, cleanly and concisely, and the rules are aids to that end—not ends in themselves. So, above all, apply wisdom in your writing. If some sentence breaks all the rules but sounds perfectly natural and does exactly what it needs to do, leave it alone.
Image courtesy of Antonio Litterio under a Creative Commons license
