Sloppy writing, sloppy thinking

[Michael West <mbwest -at- bigpond -dot- net -dot- au>]

Bruce wrote:
> [...] I have had several contracts in which I cleaned up after 
> another writer. Writing ability was not the problem in any of these 
> cases. All were written in perfectly intelligible English. However, all 
> of them suffered a lack of understanding of the subject. This lack was 
> evident not only in the obsolete and unverified information, but in the 
> turns of phrasing and ambiguous, potentially misleading statements that 
> were made.


Now here's something that interests me. Can writing
be both "perfectly intelligible" and "ambiguous and
potentially misleading" at the same time?

I don't mean to be nitpicking Bruce's perfectly
intelligible comments -- really I don't. What I want
to call attention to is the fact that it is often very
easy to spot a writer who doesn't have his facts 
straight, and to recognize this deficiency ON STYLE
GROUNDS ALONE. A writer who is unsure of his
facts will usually give himself away through
imprecise, ambiguous writing -- as happened in
the material Bruce was called in to fix. The "real"
problem, I submit, is not what the tech writer
knew or didn't know. It's WHAT HE DIDN'T
PUT IN THE DOCUMENT. Period. For 
whatever reason -- it doesn't matter.

When I read a technical document that makes me 
stumble over indirection, ambiguity, imprecision, 
sloppy phraseology, what I suspect is that the writer 
has not done his research and analysis. As an editor, I 
often find that shoring up flaccid prose is as much 
an exercise in fact-checking as it is a language exercise.
The prose is flaccid because the facts aren't there.
Why couldn't he write that paragraph more clearly? 
Because he didn't know the facts, and was trying to 
skate around them. Sloppy writing, sloppy thinking.

Someone very smart once said, "to write a clear
sentence you must first have a clear thought." The
more you think about that, the more you realize that
a disciplined writing style and a disciplined approach
to audience analysis, fact-gathering and fact-checking
go hand-in-hand. Here's a common example: overuse
of the passive voice. Why? Because when you use the
passive voice you don't have to specify by what agency
something gets done. Great! No phone call, no walk 
down the hall to lodge a query. Just say "it gets done"
without specifying how, when, where, or by whom--
and you can go home early. Sloppy thinking, sloppy 
writing.

And this, dear long-suffering colleagues, is why I
am always astounded when someone posts a statement
here to the effect that a technical document can be
both perfectly written and completely wrong (that isn't
at all what Bruce said, of course -- this is something that
has been stated here in many, many artificially-constructed 
rhetorical oppositions between "technical skills" and "writing 
skills").

I don't doubt that such a thing might come to pass through
a deliberate act of deception. That is, someone could 
*intentionally* write a load of codswallop in perfectly 
constructed expository prose just to prove a point of
some kind. But outside of politics, advertising, academia,
and a few other nests of vipers, such deliberate deception 
would be rare. What *does* happen every day is that the 
tech writer who can't be bothered to get his ducks in a row 
semantically and grammatically is the same lamer who can't 
get his facts straight. And the converse is true, too (is it not?)  
The writer who works his butt off making sure his prose is 
tight, fat-free, unambiguous, and well-organized, is NOT the 
writer who will risk ruining everything by skimping on technical 
accuracy and completeness. The two go together. Sloppy
writing, sloppy thinking.

Why do some here (NOT Bruce, I say one last time!)
keep trying to convince us that good tech-writing craft 
can exist without *both*  technical accuracy and clarity 
of expression? Is it because it is easier to pretend that 
good, honest craftsmanship is not nearly as important as 
guruhood? Sometimes you gotta wonder.

--
Michael West
Melbourne, Australia



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