This great bit of advice comes from Copyblogger. When it comes to the proper use of language in online communication, I think the key issue is one of respect. Being respectful of your readers means taking care to express yourself well, as well as avoid spelling and grammatical mistakes. Taking a slapdash approach to editing suggests that you value a few seconds of your own time more than the time of everyone who will subsequently read whatever you are producing. From my perspective, that is rather rude.
Other good resources include George Orwell’s 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language.” This includes concise and excellent advice on how to improve prose (apologies for the inappropriately gendered language):
A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus:
- What am I trying to say?
- What words will express it?
- What image or idiom will make it clearer?
- Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?
And he will probably ask himself two more:
- Could I put it more shortly?
- Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?
These basic ideas can also be reformulated as six ‘rules:’
- Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
- Never use a long word where a short one will do.
- If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
- Never use the passive where you can use the active.
- Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
- Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
These apply just as much to corporate, government, and academic documents as they do to blog posts or personal letters.
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
These rules are especially important, when you are very deliberately breaking them:
the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls
BY E. E. CUMMINGS
the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls
are unbeautiful and have comfortable minds
(also, with the church’s protestant blessings
daughters,unscented shapeless spirited)
they believe in Christ and Longfellow, both dead,
are invariably interested in so many things—
at the present writing one still finds
delighted fingers knitting for the is it Poles?
perhaps. While permanent faces coyly bandy
scandal of Mrs. N and Professor D
…. the Cambridge ladies do not care, above
Cambridge if sometimes in its box of
sky lavender and cornerless, the
moon rattles like a fragment of angry candy
Good post. I try to edit all my blog posts down to 500 words or less after I’ve written them. They almost always benefit from this.
I really think the passive voice gets a bad name. Of course if using the passive voice makes the sentence awkward then you should avoid using it in a sentence. The question is not whether one should use the passive tense or not but that one should always avoid awkward sentences.
I really just hate blanket rules and I can think of many circumstances where all the rules above could and should be broken.
“Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.”