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Home » The Why of Style

  • Mark L. Levinson

    Thanks for Reading

    June 15 2008 Posted by Mark L. Levinson under The Why of Style
    (edited 5 months, 1 week ago)

      With the column of June 1, “The Final Why,” The Why of Style has concluded a two-year fortnighly run. Any future columns will be occasional. My e-mail address remains open for questions and comments: . Thanks for reading, and particular thanks to those who wrote in from time to time. — Mark L. Levinson
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    • Mark L. Levinson

      The Final Why

      May 31 2008 Posted by Mark L. Levinson under The Why of Style
      (edited 5 months, 3 weeks ago)

      Tags:
      • columns
      • grammar
      • style
      • technical writing
      “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.”
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    • Mark L. Levinson

      Zero-Based English

      May 14 2008 Posted by Mark L. Levinson under The Why of Style
      Tags:
      • columns
      • writing style
      I’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.”
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    • Mark L. Levinson

      Reg and T.M.

      May 1 2008 Posted by Mark L. Levinson under The Why of Style
      Tags:
      • columns
      • intellectual property
      • trade names
      • trademarks
      There 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.
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    • Mark L. Levinson

      English is Only Human

      April 15 2008 Posted by Mark L. Levinson under The Why of Style
      Tags:
      • columns
      • grammar
      • language
      • style
      • usage
      • verb agreement
      The English language is only human. It didn’t anticipate everything you might want to say.
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    • Mark L. Levinson

      Can it be both raw and right?

      March 31 2008 Posted by Mark L. Levinson under The Why of Style
      (edited 7 months, 3 weeks ago)

      Tags:
      • columns
      • editing
      • review cycle
      • SMEs
      • technical review
      • technical writers
      • technical writing
      “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.”
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    • Mark L. Levinson

      Deplorable Plurals

      March 14 2008 Posted by Mark L. Levinson under The Why of Style
      Tags:
      • columns
      • grammar
      • pluralization
      • plurals
      • style
      • usage
      Writers 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.
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    • Mark L. Levinson

      “Such As” and Suchlike

      March 1 2008 Posted by Mark L. Levinson under The Why of Style
      Tags:
      • columns
      • grammar
      • such as
      • writing
      Kipling 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.
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    • Mark L. Levinson

      The Tense for What Never Happened

      February 15 2008 Posted by Mark L. Levinson under The Why of Style
      Tags:
      • columns
      • past tense
      • present perfect
      • tenses
      • usage
      • verb tense
      • verbs
      • writing style
      It 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?
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    • Mark L. Levinson

      Too Much Determination

      February 1 2008 Posted by Mark L. Levinson under The Why of Style
      (edited 9 months, 1 week ago)

      Tags:
      • antecedents
      • columns
      • double determination
      • grammar
      • sentence structure
      I 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.”
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    • Mark L. Levinson

      The Multi-Tailed Example

      January 15 2008 Posted by Mark L. Levinson under The Why of Style
      (edited 10 months ago)

      Tags:
      • ambiguity
      • columns
      • examples
      • technical writing
      • writing style
      You 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.
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    • Mark L. Levinson

      Don't Overshorten

      December 31 2007 Posted by Mark L. Levinson under The Why of Style
      (edited 10 months, 2 weeks ago)

      Tags:
      • brevity
      • columns
      • editing
      • instructions
      • technical editing
      • technical writing
      Mark Levinson

      Often technical writers slip into ambiguity because they fear wordiness.
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    • Mark L. Levinson

      The Wherefore of Style

      December 14 2007 Posted by Mark L. Levinson under The Why of Style
      (edited 10 months, 2 weeks ago)

      Tags:
      • columns
      • technical writing
      • user-friendly writing
      Mark Levinson

      I ask about the purpose, and I’m answered about the background. “Why do the user’s neckties appear on the screen in that particular order?” I ask, expecting to hear how that particular order serves the purpose of benefiting the user.
      “They appear according to the sequence in which they arrive from the database,” says Dror the developer.

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    • Mark L. Levinson

      The Andor and the Orboths

      November 30 2007 Posted by Mark L. Levinson under The Why of Style
      (edited 10 months ago)

      Tags:
      • columns
      • writing style
      What can we do to show that the slash applies to a whole phrase? Maybe pad it with spaces?
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    • Mark L. Levinson

      Forever HIPO

      November 15 2007 Posted by Mark L. Levinson under The Why of Style
      (edited 10 months ago)

      Tags:
      • columns
      • HIPO
      Before 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.
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    • Mark L. Levinson

      Unstating the Obvious

      November 1 2007 Posted by Mark L. Levinson under The Why of Style
      (edited 1 year ago)

      Tags:
      • columns
      • writing style
      Granted, 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.
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    • Mark L. Levinson

      Time for an Update

      October 14 2007 Posted by Mark L. Levinson under The Why of Style
      (edited 10 months ago)

      Tags:
      • columns
      • progress bar
      • update
      Before 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.
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    • Mark L. Levinson

      The Phrasals and the Had Had

      October 1 2007 Posted by Mark L. Levinson under The Why of Style
      (edited 10 months ago)

      Tags:
      • columns
      • Down Under
      • Edward D. Johnson
      • Mark Brader
      • phrasal verb
      • Winston Churchill
      • writing style
      Who 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.
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    • Mark L. Levinson

      Necessary Unnecessary Facts

      September 15 2007 Posted by Mark L. Levinson under The Why of Style
      (edited 10 months ago)

      Tags:
      • columns
      • Hemingway
      • writing style
      In 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.”
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    • Mark L. Levinson

      The Overgrown Dash

      September 4 2007 Posted by Mark L. Levinson under The Why of Style
        The 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..
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      • Mark L. Levinson

        The Tommy Syndrome

        August 15 2007 Posted by Mark L. Levinson under The Why of Style
          Tommy, 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.
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        • Mark L. Levinson

          When Numerals Come 1st

          August 1 2007 Posted by Mark L. Levinson under The Why of Style
            Even the 4-H club tries not to start a sentence with a numeral, and imagine how difficult it must be for them. But is there logic behind the rule?
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          • Mark L. Levinson

            The WhyNot of Style

            July 15 2007 Posted by Mark L. Levinson under The Why of Style

              Before you correct what another of God’s creatures has written, it’s your responsibility to be sure you’re reacting to a real, explainable flaw and not merely to a difference from your personal style.


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            • Mark L. Levinson

              Go-Back-Again Words

              July 1 2007 Posted by Mark L. Levinson under The Why of Style
                I can’t compare the reading of a sentence to the grubby exertion of picking up bullet casings (not most sentences, anyway) but there can be a similar disappointment when you reach the end and you need to go back over the whole thing again.
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              • Mark L. Levinson

                Life as a Computer

                June 15 2007 Posted by Mark L. Levinson under The Why of Style

                  by Mark L. Levinson

                  To anthropomorphize means “to attribute a human form or personality to” (Webster’s, 1913).  Never anthropomorphize computers.  They hate it.
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                • Mark L. Levinson

                  The Responsible “We”

                  June 1 2007 Posted by Mark L. Levinson under The Why of Style
                  (edited 1 year, 5 months ago)

                    Just as you would define any acronym on first use, it’s best to define who “we” is - “we at Neckwear Techware Limited,” for example - and to stay true to that definition.
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                  • Mark L. Levinson

                    Weak and Strong Commas

                    May 15 2007 Posted by Mark L. Levinson under The Why of Style
                    (edited 1 year, 5 months ago)

                      If you have commas serving more than one purpose in the same sentence, it’s a good idea to consider whether all the commas are necessary.
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                    • Mark L. Levinson

                      Forcing a Comma

                      May 1 2007 Posted by Mark L. Levinson under The Why of Style
                        Because everything depends on the division between subject and predicate, sometimes a writer is tempted to mark that division with a comma. Particularly if the subject is long, or weighty, or followed by a pause when you speak the sentence, or if the subject is full of internal punctuation itself, or if the end of the subject isn’t obvious at a glance, the devil will offer you a comma as a tool of clarification.
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                      • Mark L. Levinson

                        Left and Right Commas

                        April 14 2007 Posted by Mark L. Levinson under The Why of Style
                          If commas came in left-hand and right-hand versions, like parentheses, quotation marks, and Spanish question marks, then I think writers would be less likely to leave commas without their mates. For example, some writers - possibly fearful of comma clutter - use a comma before a year but not after it.
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                        • Mark L. Levinson

                          The Days of Wine and Charoses

                          March 31 2007 Posted by Mark L. Levinson under The Why of Style
                          (edited 1 year, 7 months ago)

                            The important principles of technical writing are already present in the Hagaddah, the venerable promptbook for the Passover meal. We moderns have invented nothing.
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                          • Mark L. Levinson

                            Collaboration

                            March 14 2007 Posted by Mark L. Levinson under The Why of Style
                            (edited 1 year, 8 months ago)

                              The elevator door chimed open and Mumpy stepped out. Maybe she knows a good graphic artist, I thought. I needed to produce a brochure for the TiePlumb computerized necktie straightness gauge.
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                            • Mark L. Levinson

                              The Yucan, Your 2nd-Best Friend

                              March 1 2007 Posted by Mark L. Levinson under The Why of Style
                              (edited 1 year, 8 months ago)

                                When I receive a document from R&D, it’s easy to tell whether Dror wrote it or Liora did. Dror is an allower, whereas Liora is an enabler.
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                              • Mark L. Levinson

                                Repetition, the Forbidden Tool

                                February 14 2007 Posted by Mark L. Levinson under The Why of Style
                                  In technical writing, one of the basic challenges of the print medium is that its nature is linear while the nature of the topic — of the product or process — may have more to do with a hierarchical or random-access structure. Often what makes repetition seem called for is the attempt to force a non-linear structure into a linear one.
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                                • Mark L. Levinson

                                  Re-logonning

                                  February 1 2007 Posted by Mark L. Levinson under The Why of Style
                                    There isn’t a single dictionary on http://www.onelook.com that lists “log onto” or “log into.” However, in usage “onto” and “into” are fairly strong. On Google, “you log in to” versus “you log into” is 549,000 to 488,000.
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                                  • Mark L. Levinson

                                    With Regard to Worth

                                    January 15 2007 Posted by Mark L. Levinson under The Why of Style
                                      I was sent to the class next door, where I asked the neighboring teacher for “two people’s worth of plasticene.” She laughed.
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                                    • elephant  (Svi Ben-Elya)

                                      Archived Articles

                                      January 14 2007 Posted by elephant (Svi Ben-Elya) under The Why of Style
                                        List of archived episodes of The Why of Style. Only visible to Elephant members who login. You can apply for membership at http://www.elephant.org.il/faq_and_application/application_form.htm
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                                      • Mark L. Levinson

                                        For Fewer Parentheses

                                        January 2 2007 Posted by Mark L. Levinson under The Why of Style
                                          If the parenthesized remark is a less important point or an afterthought, the end of the paragraph is a fine place for it to stand out in the open, like a modest hut on the beach with the whole city of sentences on one side and the echoless edge of the island on the other.
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                                        • Mark L. Levinson

                                          The Dictionary as Doberman

                                          December 15 2006 Posted by Mark L. Levinson under The Why of Style
                                            The dictionary pretends to be a conscientious follower but, like a hundred-pound Doberman being walked on a leash, it can’t be led anywhere it doesn’t want to go. The word “seperate” has more than nineteen million hits on Google but no dictionary recognizes “seperate” as a legitimate spelling.
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                                          • Mark L. Levinson

                                            Is the Colon a Multiplexer?

                                            December 1 2006 Posted by Mark L. Levinson under The Why of Style
                                              Colons are like piercings. Back in the day, they had their strictly prescribed positions and you seldom saw them anywhere else. Now people insert them all over the place.
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                                            • Mark L. Levinson

                                              Eyecatchers and Eyedodgers

                                              November 15 2006 Posted by Mark L. Levinson under The Why of Style
                                                When you’re intently reading pages of 10-point type, your eyes may not bother to readjust for those few words of big print. Your brain may not bother to adjust from absorbing low-level exposition to absorbing a high-level concept.
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                                              • Mark L. Levinson

                                                Writing Against the Future

                                                November 1 2006 Posted by Mark L. Levinson under The Why of Style
                                                  The point is to think what might happen in the future. And I’m not talking about puzzled scholars in the year 6000 wondering what kind of a tube was a YouTube. I’m talking about the customers of your product’s next version.
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                                                • Mark L. Levinson

                                                  Hebrew Isn't All Bad

                                                  October 15 2006 Posted by Mark L. Levinson under The Why of Style
                                                    As a naive new immigrant, I would say to people “How are you?” in Hebrew, translating literally. They looked back at me as if I had asked “Why are you?”
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                                                  • Mark L. Levinson

                                                    Space Resurgent

                                                    October 1 2006 Posted by Mark L. Levinson under The Why of Style
                                                      The screen of the 1970s gave us 24 lines of 80 characters each, which continued to encourage compressing the message. Only recently have we started to see high resolution, big screens, and with them a re-emergence of white space.
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                                                    • Mark L. Levinson

                                                      Words That Want Too Much (2)

                                                      September 15 2006 Posted by Mark L. Levinson under The Why of Style
                                                        A fable: In its youth, the word However was just another member of the Ever family, like Wherever and Whoever and Whichever. They all had simple meanings.
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                                                      • Mark L. Levinson

                                                        Words That Want Too Much (1)

                                                        September 1 2006 Posted by Mark L. Levinson under The Why of Style
                                                        (edited 8 months, 3 weeks ago)

                                                          When I was young, and English was English, or at least it was American, “multiple” meant only one thing.
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                                                        • Mark L. Levinson

                                                          Heroism and Minimalism

                                                          August 14 2006 Posted by Mark L. Levinson under The Why of Style
                                                          (edited 8 months, 3 weeks ago)

                                                            I suppose it’s unusual for a technical-writing department to have a slogan, but when I worked at Daisy Systems the department had a slogan: “The user is the hero.”
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                                                          • Mark L. Levinson

                                                            Is it an If or a Lest?

                                                            August 1 2006 Posted by Mark L. Levinson under The Why of Style
                                                            (edited 8 months, 3 weeks ago)

                                                              Here’s an expression to drive you crazy: “in case.”

                                                              “Just in case there’s a fire, we keep a bucket of sand handy.” We keep the sand handy whether there’s a fire or not, because some day there might be one.
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                                                            • Mark L. Levinson

                                                              When Not to Be Interesting

                                                              July 15 2006 Posted by Mark L. Levinson under The Why of Style
                                                              (edited 8 months, 3 weeks ago)

                                                                Some writers labor to keep their sentences uncluttered but clutter their examples with items that are distracting or even dangerous. If an example calls for a list of usernames, they’ll list their favorite basketball players or favorite fictional characters. But your favorite basketball player sells his name for use on sport socks for millions of dollars.
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                                                              • Mark L. Levinson

                                                                This and That

                                                                June 30 2006 Posted by Mark L. Levinson under The Why of Style
                                                                (edited 8 months, 3 weeks ago)

                                                                  The old preacher’s advice goes, “Tell them what you’re gonna
                                                                  tell them, then tell them, and then tell them what you told them.”
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                                                                • Mark L. Levinson

                                                                  Opening

                                                                  June 13 2006 Posted by Mark L. Levinson under The Why of Style
                                                                  (edited 8 months, 3 weeks ago)

                                                                    When you start reading the TiePlumb User Guide, be it a booklet or a help system, what should the first sentence say to you? I’ve seen some first sentences that say “Welcome,” I’ve seen “Thank you,” and I’ve even seen “Congratulations.”

                                                                    “Welcome” is supposed to sound friendly, but to me it sounds arrogant and inaccurate. It says, “You are in our territory now. We are the proprietors and you are the disoriented stranger.” Wrong message.
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