You could also call this item Pet Peeves in technical writing Prayed Wow, I guess I wasn’t thinking when I wrote that.. You may notice, as you write, well, anything, that the tendency is to fall into some questionable, actually very bad, writing habits. Sometimes, like when writing creatively, these clothes aren’t too bad. Sometimes the writing style is relaxed and conversational so that the laziness of the writing doesn’t show as much. In technical writing, all that laziness is sheer nonsense.

Let’s take the word ‘very’. If you can find it in the paragraph above, you’ll notice that it was part of the phrase ‘too bad’. I read an article recently that the word ‘very’ is a great example of lazy typing. If something is ‘very’ anything, there’s probably a word for it. Like ‘very bad’ it could be ‘terrible’ or ‘horrible’ or even ‘disastrous’. I could definitely see his point. Personally, I cringe every time I hear a newscaster say, “Stay tuned for the latest on that story.” If anyone can tell me how much later is the latest than the latest, which for the record is the superlative of late, I’d really appreciate it.

Note: the above use of very was for sarcastic emphasis, not due to stylistic faults on my part. Just say.

Another lazy form of technical writing is the overuse or even use of the phrases ‘there is’ and ‘there are’. It’s so easy to start a sentence with ‘there’. It seems to help you start your writing process. If you need to do that while you’re putting ideas on paper, go ahead and do it and then go back and rewrite these sentences out of existence. For example, in the second paragraph of this article, see where I wrote “…there’s probably a word for it.” If this wasn’t an example, I’d go back and rewrite this sentence as “there’s probably already a word for it.” No more ‘there’. By the way, this is an extremely difficult habit to break.

Another junk word in technical writing is ‘really’. Yeah, it really irritates me when ‘really’ is used as an emphasis in technical writing. If you’re not really writing really teen dialogue, you can probably get rid of this word entirely in the technical docs.

Just to round out the pantheon of not being the lazy author, let me mention weeds. These are words that we group into empty sentences. You can usually replace each sentence with a single word. My favorite is ‘in order to’. All you want to say is ‘to’ so just use ‘to’. It seems harmless enough but believe me, all those excess words are just a hindrance to what you are trying to say. Let me give you some more examples:

• most of… most
• A number of…many
• Currently… now
• Right now… now
• Have the ability to…can
• In case… if
• In view of the fact that… because
• It often happens that… often
• refer to… refer to
• daily…daily
• On the grounds that… because
• Take into account… consider
• Until the moment when… until

Obviously, because our speaking style often shapes our writing style, many of these junk words and phrases magically appear in our technical writing documents. That is not sin. Sin is leaving them there and that is where laziness comes in. After you’ve written something, go back and look for the usual suspects, like misspellings and passive voice. When you’ve done that, read your copy again and delete all the junk. You’ll really be very happy you did.