Tech Biz Writing

Coherence
We all know people who ramble on in conversation, jumping from one idea to another, seemingly without connection except a vague chain of association. We call this incoherence as nothing seems to hang together. Texts too need to be coherent, otherwise we would hardly call them “texts” at all. There must be a flow of meaning and subject matter, with a clear linkage from sentence to sentence, and paragraph to paragraph. We don’t always remark on it when it’s there. But when it’s absent we know we’re with the fairies in the foliage.

A technical writer, especially, must be coherent: texts describing the use of electronic or mechanical equipment pose a danger to the user if they are not absolutely clear.

Cohesion
Cohesion is much more complicated to deal with and we will spend the rest of this section on this vital task in all written, or spoken, texts. Cohesion breaks down naturally into three main areas:

* Referring words which allow the writer to refer back or forward without repetition -
- pronouns
- determiners
- auxiliary verbs
- signpost words
* Ellipsis which enables the writer to refer back while missing out sections of text without confusion.
* Sentence adverbials which allow extra cohesion through the use of:
- conjuncts
- disjuncts.

Cohesion, then, is the process by which we fix or glue sentences together by the subtle use of grammar and vocabulary. Both choice of words and pattern of text are used for this essential, and usually unconscious, process. Repetition of a sound-bite or key word or phrase is a favourite trick of orators, sometimes effective, often irritating.

Grammatical devices, such as:

* anaphoric deixis - referring back, and
* cataphonic deixis - referring forward

are a central means of achieving cohesion in linear texts.

We will begin then with -

Referring words
Words which refer back are:

* Pronouns — which refer back to -
nouns
noun phrases
other pronouns; as in: “The man turned the corner, but his steering was faulty and he hit another vehicle.”
* Determiners — which imply or state a reference back; as in: “She bought three goldfish and a budgie. The budgie was blue.”
* Auxiliary verbs — which can stand in for a whole verb phrase; as in: “He had promised them all computers for Christmas, but was unable to do so because he had lost his job.”

Ellipsis
Pronouns and other words enable the writer to refer back, or forward, without repeating words or phrases. It’s possible to avoid repetition of a verb, for example, by using an auxiliary: “I have played many more instruments than she has.” where has stands in for the verb phrase have played.

There are several ways this can be done:

* Contrasting subjects
“Peter shaves more often than I do.”
* Contrasting objects
“He played rugby with more verve than he did cricket.”

Sentence adverbials
Conjuncts and disjuncts link different parts of a text together. For example:

* Adding and listing
“First we went to London. Then we headed north. Finally we went back to Brighton.”
Similar sentence adverbials include: meanwhile, next, last, soon, besides, also, as well, and many more.

Tracing simple grammar from a single character or word to the building of texts, is a useful exercise for all writers, whether technical or not. It will make you a better writer in the end, if you follow the time-honoured conventions, and avoid the glaring faux pas of the novice.

Next: 65. Proofreading

Morphemes
Morphemes are the parts of words which change when the word applies to a distinctly different situation. For example, a plural, or a change of tense. So that children is the plural of child, and “ren” is the morpheme. For a verb, we get: play plays playing played.

Phrases
Phrases are bundles of words which naturally cluster together and perform a particular function in a sentence. For example:

His beautiful girlfriend Sally has been assembling a new wardrobe of designer clothes.

You can easily divide this sentence into three parts:

His beautiful girlfriend Sally
has been assembling
a new wardrobe of designer clothes.

It will not divide any other way without losing its essential meaning, which can be reduced to three words: Sally bought clothes. These are phrases.

Clauses
Clauses are made up of either words or phrases, and each of these atoms has a different role in the process. Thus:

* Sally is the subject, or what the clause is about.
* bought is the verb, or the action part.
* clothes is the object, or what has been affected by the action.

Sentences
If, as is often said, a sentence is the complete expression of a single thought, what are we to make of those sentences in 19th-century novels which go on for more than a page or two? Or, by complete contrast, “sentences” in advertising-speak, such as Brilliant!

At its most basic, a sentence is the same as a clause: subject, verb, object, as in the above case. Sometimes, however, sentences consist of more than one clause, and the more they contain, the less easy they are to read.

Building Texts
The largest unit we have considered so far is the sentence, on the basis that words combine to form phrases which combine to form clauses which combine to form sentences. But sentences combine in many ways to form texts, and that is what we will now examine.

A text is a unit of communication which is largely self-contained and which serves a specific purpose. It contains a series of sentences which are related to each other by:

* Structure
* Coherence
* Cohesion

Structure
Many texts are given structure by a formal pattern, the most common of which is the paragraph. There are other conventions, however, e.g. the layout of some advertising copy or a recipe.

Paragraphs form a useful function in that they formulate sub-topics of the text into recognisable units, which break up the page and make it more comprehensible and easier to read. Though representing a sub-topic in the text, most paragraphs tend to lead on from the previous one, and provide a linkage with the next. Generally we can break down a paragraph into three sub-units:

* Topic sentence which introduces the main theme of the paragraph.
* Development sentences which take the theme forward.
* Rounding-off sentence which naturally concludes it and leads on to the next.

Next: 64. Creating texts — Part 3.

The putting together of texts from the individual atoms of writing involves another bete noire of the written universe: grammar. To say that grammar is easy is a very smug statement, especially as it’s scarcely taught in modern schools. Whole English departments are grammar-free zones. Yet you can hardly call yourself a writer if you know nothing of it, or imagine it’s a word describing your grandmother.

We’re going to tackle grammar here in its basic form, beginning with the atoms that compose it, and moving on to how these elements are put together for building texts. For that is what writing is: creating texts from smaller elements, while retaining coherence, cohesion, structure, and, ultimately, meaning.

The Levels of Grammar

Grammar operates at five levels of increasing complexity:

* Words
* Morphemes.
* Phrases
* Clauses
* Sentences

These all work together at any one point, so although we can define them singly, we must bear them all in mind when creating, or parsing sentences.

To make the point clearer, we shall examine all these levels in the context of a single sentence: The children played Scrabble while their father sent an email.

The sentence breaks naturally into parts, each virtually a complete sentence in itself:

* The children played Scrabble
* Their father sent an email.

The five levels of grammar are represented thus:

* Word: Children.
* Morpheme: Child - ren.
* Phrase: The children.
* Clause: The children played Scrabble.
* Sentence: The children played Scrabble while their father sent an email.

Words
Words are the building blocks of a text; they both bear the meaning and hold the sentences together. Thus there are two types of word.

* That carry meaning.
* That bind a sentence together.

The words that carry the meaning in the example sentence are:

children played Scrabble father sent email

Each has a specific meaning which can be defined in a dictionary.

The words which bind the sentence together are:

The while their an

These words don’t bear a specific meaning, but the dictionary tells us how they are to be used, e.g. “indicating a contrast”.

Apart from these two types, there are also classes of word. The meaning or content words are classed into:

* Nouns
e.g. Scrabble
* Verbs
e.g. played
* Adjectives
e.g. yellow
* Adverbs
e.g. quickly

Binding or structure words are classed into:

* Pronouns
e.g. she
* Conjunctions
e.g. while
* Prepositions
e.g. beside
* Determiners
e.g. an

Next : 63. Creating texts - Part 2

Question mark
a) The question mark is used after every direct question: “Will you?” It is followed by a capital letter. It is not required for indirect questions: “They asked me why I had done it.”

Exclamation mark
A rag-bag of a mark, which most editors dislike as it has an amateurish quality about it. However, it is used quite a lot in a variety of guises. We can’t cover them all here, but essentially it expresses surprise, astonishment, large emphasis. It should never be used more than once adjacently since a gentleman is never that surprised about anything!

Apostrophe
Another contentious issue: in today’s educational climate apostrophes are often dropped, especially by sign-writers. Unfortunately this trend has been passed down to many of our school children who may well grow up in a world without them. They are used to show the possessive case, e.g.: “John’s book”. In the plural it goes outside the “s”: “The girls’ cases”. But, “Jesus’s parable”. There is a growing tendency to drop the final “s” in the latter case, though this is an ugly construct in speech. “Jesus parable” is now commonly heard, even among clerics. Lazy speech and texts are all around us. It can cause ambiguity, so be careful whichever method you choose.

Dashes
The hyphen is the best-known of the dashes by far, and to prove it we have just used one. Its utility is extensive, but the rules for its use are sometimes vague. For editing professionals, however, the difference between it and two other dashes are essential knowledge. The en and em dashes are the preserve of compositors, printers and copyeditors. We will examine the hyphen first:

a) Hyphen connect words that are closer in usage than the rest of the syntax. There are no hard and fast rules which apply here, e.g.: motor cycle, but motorway, and motor-cyclist. It’s just a matter of convention in most cases.

Just to be awkward, the New Oxford Dictionary of English drops all the hyphens from its list of motor words. So, motorbike and motor car are given, but motor-cyclist is given as motorcyclist. Why should those people over at OUP be more right than anyone else? You’re on your own, I’m afraid. It’s all a matter of taste.

But to be consistent with current usage it’s probably just as well to use a single authority, such as the NOD. The American tendency to draw two words together in one is gaining ascendancy and will probably be the norm before long. Not so very long ago we used, to-day as standard. It looks rather odd now unless you read a lot of books written before the last war.

Nouns made up from phrasal verbs — verb + adverb — tend to be more predictable… but not always: set-back, but feedback, for example. Words which are used in American usage more than British English will almost always appear as a joined up word/phrase.

Perhaps the most predictable are various collocations which don’t have a hyphen normally, but which are hyphenated when used as an adjective. J.B. Priestley’s “A tremendous wrapping-up-and-throwing-away gesture.” is an extreme example. The difference is illustrated by “The twenty-first century.” But, “Twenty-first-century blues.”

The Oxford guides give page after page of examples. If you wish to become a hyphen-geek, or even a Hyphen Geek, or perhaps a hyphengeek, please feel free to consult these excellent tomes. Right now we’ll move on to a more interesting aspect of dash science, the en and the em.

b) The en rule differs from the hyphen in that it joins words when movement or opposition is meant. It often substitutes for to, as in: “The 1939–45 war”, or versus, as in “The Chelsea–Leeds match”.

But, if a joint position is mean, then: “The Chelsea-Leeds proposal” has a hyphen. For joint authors, Smith–Evans, an en is right. For a double-barrelled name, Smith-Evans, a hyphen. The difference in print: - (hyphen), – (en). The en is slightly longer. The em, which we will come to next, is longer again: —

c) The em rule marks an interruption in a sentence’s structure, either singly or, as a parenthetical pair: “I don’t think —though you may disagree with me — that it’s the right answer.”

Quotation marks
These enclose quotations of direct speech. Modern usage is for single quotation marks, rather than double, but the old system is still in use in some newspapers and books — as well as this course.
In a case like: ‘“That’s great,” she said,’ the comma after great is regarded as a full stop.

Quotation marks, enclosing roman type, are usually used for chapters of books, titles of articles in periodicals, poems, not published separately, &c.
Titles of whole books and periodicals are usually printed in italic type.

Parentheses
Are used to enclose:
a) Definitions, special authorities, references, translations &c.

b) Remarks made directly by the writer: “Binky (as I always called him) rang the bell.”

c) Interruptions to a speech, by an audience, for example.

d) To left, instead of a full stop.

e) Words which are optional to the sentence: “There are (seemingly) a lot of problems.”

f) Square brackets [ ] enclose corrections, comments, interpolations (by an editor, for example), notes or translations, which are not in the original text.

Punctuation is an essential conveyor of meaning, and adds considerable sophistication and flexibility to a text. Used properly, and with care, it bestows cadence and elegance to any piece of writing. Even technical writers, who are not known for their exquisite prose style, can increase the authority of their work — and their reputation — by a good knowledge of the art of punctuation.

Next 62. Creating texts - Part 1