![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Damn passive voice!
Mar. 30th, 2005 09:45 pmIn January, my boss passed me some other guy's partially completed document, based on a document the boss himself had done before he came here, based on some standards being set by some provincial government body somewhere (not Alberta or BC, though). It was kind of a mess and I was supposed to "take ownership of it". Uh, whatever that means.
I made some of the recommended revisions. Tore out fistfuls of crap and made the document more generally applicable. Disagreed with a bunch of stuff and banged my head against the desk more than a few times. But I got to review it with my boss and the previous owner last week.
Seemed to get vacuous agreement about my changes. Oh, and a strong recommendation that the document needs to be rewritten. I suffered a psychotic split along the lines of:
What?! But you're the two idiots who made it look this way!
and
Oh, thank god, I was hoping someone would suggest it.
At some point I'm supposed to present this document to a bunch of marketing types. Aside from organizing the content better and adding in diagrams where they would do some actual good, I thought I'd look at improving the overall readability. I don't usually pay any attention to the Flesch-Kincaid results that MS Word spits out. The technical documentation I've worked on before violates most of the recommended results even when I try really hard. Extensive use of passive voice does that. A huge dependency on jargon does that, too.
But for this effort, it seemed worthwhile to try and write something that would be more accessible. I'm discovering what a good idea this is. Not only am I depending on passive voice where I don't need to, but I'm starting to question why I ever thought technical documentation should be crammed full of it in the first place.
It's hard, though. I have bad habits. I'm so used to this writing style that I don't even notice passive voice anymore. I'm feeling twitchy just writing this post. So, anyway, I'm learning a handy new habit at work. Not one I expected to get. And I've found a feature in Word that I like. And it's a feature that Open Office doesn't seem to have (in version 1.1.2 anyway). [This brings the list of features I wish I had in Open Office to a grand total of two.] Anyone able to recommend something that way?
I made some of the recommended revisions. Tore out fistfuls of crap and made the document more generally applicable. Disagreed with a bunch of stuff and banged my head against the desk more than a few times. But I got to review it with my boss and the previous owner last week.
Seemed to get vacuous agreement about my changes. Oh, and a strong recommendation that the document needs to be rewritten. I suffered a psychotic split along the lines of:
What?! But you're the two idiots who made it look this way!
and
Oh, thank god, I was hoping someone would suggest it.
At some point I'm supposed to present this document to a bunch of marketing types. Aside from organizing the content better and adding in diagrams where they would do some actual good, I thought I'd look at improving the overall readability. I don't usually pay any attention to the Flesch-Kincaid results that MS Word spits out. The technical documentation I've worked on before violates most of the recommended results even when I try really hard. Extensive use of passive voice does that. A huge dependency on jargon does that, too.
But for this effort, it seemed worthwhile to try and write something that would be more accessible. I'm discovering what a good idea this is. Not only am I depending on passive voice where I don't need to, but I'm starting to question why I ever thought technical documentation should be crammed full of it in the first place.
It's hard, though. I have bad habits. I'm so used to this writing style that I don't even notice passive voice anymore. I'm feeling twitchy just writing this post. So, anyway, I'm learning a handy new habit at work. Not one I expected to get. And I've found a feature in Word that I like. And it's a feature that Open Office doesn't seem to have (in version 1.1.2 anyway). [This brings the list of features I wish I had in Open Office to a grand total of two.] Anyone able to recommend something that way?
