Technical Writing Archives - Words by a Pro

Policy and Procedure Documents Without Tears

Morris Vaughan — Tue, 17 Jul 2018 20:43:32 +0000

If you are a professional writer in a corporate setting, and are extremely unlucky, you may be called upon to write policy and procedure (P&P) documents. This is actually a good thing, for the company if not for you. Many P&P documents are written either by lawyers, in which case they are completely incomprehensible, or […]

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Citation Needed: Why Your Writing Depends on Citing Your Sources

Morris Vaughan — Tue, 17 Oct 2017 20:47:13 +0000

Journalists, academics, and Wikipedia contributors have widely varying abilities to put together coherent sentences, but they all know this: Unless it’s a firsthand account, something stated as a fact, without a source to back it up, is merely an opinion. Of course, there are many ways to cite sources, and there is a time and […]

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Is Sentence Length a True Indicator of Readability?

Morris Vaughan — Tue, 23 May 2017 21:03:33 +0000

Have you ever been reading something and reached the end of a sentence, then had to start reading the sentence again because you forgot what it was about? Do you think it was simply because it was a long sentence? Or were there other reasons? We are often told that short sentences are more readable […]

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Numbers Racket: Incorporating Numbers and Math in Your Writing

Morris Vaughan — Tue, 28 Feb 2017 21:52:17 +0000

If you’re like most professional writers, you avoid any math more complicated than balancing your checkbook. You might not even do that anymore, since you can just check your bank balance on your phone. A math-free life—how great is that? In some cases, however, you may incorporate numbers or mathematics into your writing—in scientific or […]

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Just the Facts: Technical Material for a Nontechnical Audience

Morris Vaughan — Tue, 07 Jun 2016 20:24:52 +0000

There is almost nothing as metaphorically, if not physically, painful as watching two people who don’t know what they’re talking about try to explain something to each other. It’s as if the two come away from the encounter with less collective knowledge than they started with. Writing can be like that, sometimes: You have to […]

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Why Mobile is Igniting the Software Tech Writing World

Morris Vaughan — Wed, 09 Dec 2015 02:15:52 +0000

There was a time, in the not-too-distant past, when technical writing as a profession held a comfortable, well-established place in the development of products and software. At least, among mature organizations who understood the value that a technical writer brings to the process. Particularly in the software industry, technical writers could count on a fairly […]

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