Since I am now the go-to writer in my office, I was tasked this week with editing an article written for a trade magazine. I was happy to oblige since it meant that I got to have an actual assignment, but I was surprised at the writer's style choices.
You see, while I was never given a company style guide (and had been told that we didn't have one), I went digging around on the company's intranet and found something close: a writer's guide. The guide didn't teach me anything new, but it did give me some clear guidance on stylistic matters. I bring this up because it was pretty clear that the article's writer had not seen the writer's guide.
For example, the writer's guide recommends using short sentences whenever possible. I agree with this technique and often use it myself. This article, however, was written with overly-long and complex sentence that were cumbersome to read at best and hard to follow at worst.
Another problem was repeated word usage. In technical documents, even articles, it's important to establish a vocabulary and use it the same way each time, but only for the technical parts. Since the article was about the benefits of different refrigerants, each fluid would need to be introduced and then only referred to by that name (you shouldn't bring up the trademarked "Puron" and then call it by its generic name "R-410A"). That said, the other words are not locked in and the writer seemed to not have a lot of creativity when it came to transitions and used the same two throughout the article.
Now, I don't fault the writer of this article for making these mistakes (the second issue wasn't even covered in the writer's guide), but they stood out to me.
This story is just an example of why my position in the company is necessary and why I already like my job so much.
No comments:
Post a Comment