Avoid These Bad Writing Habits that People Think are Good

Your own ideas are always going to make sense in your own head. The trick to good writing lies in being able to express your ideas in a way that they will also make sense to a reader who is encountering them for the first time. Communication is about empathy, and writing is no exception.

Using empathy to write clearly is like user journey mapping

To write clearly, you have to consider the process that the reader is going to go through when they read your work. You need to be able to put yourself in the position of your reader and ask yourself whether each word that you’re using is going to make sense as it is read.

The Wikipedia style guide encourages writers to follow something called the principle of least astonishment. The principle of least astonishment states that the user should not be surprised by anything in your article. The principle was, I think uncoincidentally, originally a rule of user interface design. It was then later taken up as a writing principle. The core idea is that information should be understandable to the reader without struggle.

Indeed, designers reading this article should recognise that most of what I’m describing could be also probably be characterised as just user journey mapping. The only real difference is that readers always read from left to right and top to bottom, so that you always know what a reader has already seen when they arrive at a word. In this piece, I will illustrate how thinking about empathy can help you makes sense of some stylistic rules and guidelines with some examples.

Avoid words like “aforementioned”, “former”, “latter” etc.

When most people read a sentence, they aren’t going to remember every word, let alone every word’s order. As a result, in most cases where you use a word like “latter”, the reader is going to have to stop, go back, and re-read the previous sentence to remember what the “latter” thing was (I would say that the reader is like a goldfish, but according to the neuroscientist in my office goldfish actually remember things just fine).

Define new terms before you use them

This should seem obvious, but even the best writers frequently introduce new words without first defining them. Here is an example from a friend’s PHd thesis:

“The second paradox is the relationship/bobject paradox. Bobjects (named this way so as to avoid confusion with ‘objects’ from the subject/object paradox) are anchors within reality.”

The writer uses the word “bobject” twice before explaining what it is. No matter how smart the reader is, they are going to get confused and frustrated when they read these sentences (which were ironically written to avoid confusion!)

Hyphenation

Hyphenation rules are complex and many guides recommend that you actually check a dictionary in every case to see whether you need a hyphen. My personal rule of thumb is to just to ask whether there is any potential for the reader to be confused when they read the word. Consider these two sentences:

“Take the load of washing to the laundry.”

“Take the load bearing cables for maintenance.”

These sentences show that after a reader has read “Take the load […]” it’s impossible to know what part of speech “load” is without reading further. I.e. the word doesn’t make sense as it is read. Most readers will probably subconsciously assume that a noun is intended unless otherwise indicated. Therefore, you should use a hyphen in the second sentence.

Use fewer abbreviations

A big part of empathy is knowing who your reader is. If your document is only ever going to be read by people who work in your field, then there’s nothing wrong with using abbreviation.

However, if you are writing a report, or maybe a blog post, you need to think about whether it is really only going to be read by people who know what your abbreviations mean. Will no one just randomly stumble onto your page, or maybe even just be interested in it even though they’re from another field? If the answer is yes, then ask yourself whether those people should really have to go and look up what “CRM” stands for just to understand your piece.

Using abbreviations that people don’t understand, and shouldn’t have to understand, doesn’t make you smarter. It just makes your writing unclear.

Get Specific

As a writer, you need to constantly avoid the temptation to skim over specifics. This is again because you will usually have a better understanding of what you are writing about than the person who is reading it.

If you don’t write what you mean, then the user necessarily cannot know. Here is an example sentence written by a professional CV writing company:

“Utilising logic, as well as reasoning to identify various strengths and weaknesses of the alternative solutions, conclusions or approaches to challenges, subsequently meeting the company’s goals and objectives.”

Notwithstanding its length, this sentence is written at a stratospheric level of abstraction and tells me absolutely nothing about what the candidate actually does. What types of reasoning? What types of solutions? I’m sure that the person who wrote that knows. But I don’t.

In Conclusion

The upshot of these principles is just that you need to properly empathise with the reader when writing your piece. The reader has taken the time to read your piece, don’t make them regret it by making them have to jump around to understand what you’re saying.

Neil du Toit is a data strategist at Q Division. In his free time, he writes more interesting articles for his personal blog.