“When we didn’t have a manual yet, when we didn’t know what to name the commands on our menus, when we needed our business cards spelled right, we couldn’t have done without you,” the boss said. “But now the product is in release, and I don’t see the ROI from fine-polishing the error messages.”
Read MoreI’ve run into people who make a virtue out of ignorance. On both sides of the fence. Some are technical writers and they say, “Because I know nothing about your product, I can serve as a model of the user’s point of view.” “But you’re nothing like our users,” say the technicians, “because you’re not in the same business.” Then they tell the writer, “Because my English isn’t very good, my writing can serve as a model of how to write for people whose English isn’t very good.”
Read MoreThere are three kinds of trademarks: our own trademarks, trademarks of other companies we like to be on good terms with, and trademarks of other companies we don’t care about. We demand respect for our own trademarks, we give respect to the trademarks of other companies we like to be on good terms with, and hey, we don’t much care about trademarks of other companies we don’t care about.
Read MoreThe English language is only human. It didn’t anticipate everything you might want to say.
Read More“You know you guys are crazy?” said old Genady. “You tell one person that the way you write the material makes it right or wrong, but you ask another person to tell you whether it’s right or wrong before you’ve written it correctly and you’re angry that he tries to correct the writing.”
Read MoreWriters who find the word “and” overused substitute “along with,” “in addition to,” “not to mention,” “as well as,” or “besides,” without realizing that each of those substitutes has its own connotation and none of them has the power of creating a plural.
Read MoreKipling mentioned “such boastings as the Gentiles use, or lesser breeds without the Law.” In other words, only a certain kind of boasting. But if he had written “boastings, such as the Gentiles use,” it would include all boastings and those of the Gentiles would be just an example.
Read MoreIt makes sense to say “I’ve never seen such a beautiful view.” But there’s a complication. If I’m looking at such a beautiful view right now, how can I say I’ve never seen one?
Read MoreI knew I couldn’t put across an explanation, but perhaps I could at least put across the impression that I think I know what I’m talking about. “It comes down to a difference between English and Hebrew,” I said. “The word ‘it,’ in the objective case, can serve as a relative pronoun in Hebrew but not in English.”
Read MoreYou try to write the example so that it reaches out a well-directed hand to the reader, and the reader grabs the example by the tail.
Read MoreWe learn what to do from the people who had trouble doing it. It was the Talmudic grouch Shammai who said “Receive all men with good cheer.” And it was Marcus Fabius Quintilianus, a writer wrestling with the ambiguities of Latin, who wrote “Take care not merely to make understanding possible, but to make misunderstanding utterly impossible.”
Read MoreMy Hebrew teacher back on the kibbutz, Rachel Spitzer, explained to us that Hebrew had one “why” word to ask about purpose and another one to ask about underlying cause. “Aha!” I thought, and I ran to the Internet — after a technical delay of thirty-five years — to check my theory that in English the same distinction properly separates “why” and “wherefore.” No such luck. No clean distinction in the King James Bible, and no clean distinction in the dictionary.
Read MoreWhat can we do to show that the slash applies to a whole phrase? Maybe pad it with spaces?
Read MoreBefore you set about doing something, you should know what you’re starting with, what you’re planning to do to it, and what you expect to wind up with at the end. And that pattern of input, process, and output is hierarchical.
Read MoreGranted, writing needs to acknowledge the known, at least tacitly, in order to stably introduce the unknown. But still, every sentence - even the first one - should add informational value if possible.
Read MoreBefore the progress bar reached 100 percent, I wrote the preceding thirty-two editions of this column. Now that they’ve all appeared, it’s time for an update because in the meantime some e-mail has come in.
Read MoreWho cares what’s a phrasal verb and what isn’t? In my experience, the only people who care are people looking for an excuse to end a sentence with a preposition. And they’re wasting their time.
Read MoreIn order to write correctly what you know, you need to know more than you write. Hemingway said, “When a writer omits things he does not know, they show like holes in his writing.”
Read MoreThe em dash was not just left off the keyboard. While no one was looking at it over on the upper-ascii sidelines, it was sabotaged..
Read MoreTommy, in The Who’s rock opera of the same name, achieved spiritual enlightenment after psychosomatically losing the powers of hearing, sight, and speech, so he tried to tell his disciples all to “Put in your ear plugs, put on your eye shades, you know where to put the cork!” The Tommy Syndrome is everywhere.
Read MoreSite for Israel's professional tech writing and marcom community. Originally based in what has become Israel's 2nd largest R&D center (Yokneam), Elephant brings together technical and marcom writers from all over Israel. Behind the scenes and between meetings, members stay in contact with job offers and leads, joint projects, and professional assistance.
Using the wrong technical writer is like using a wrench to open a door, it works, but a door knob is better and cheaper. Elephant was started to help match writers and copy editors with companies where their skills match company needs.
