Alert: Grammar complaint. Don’t worry, it’s not my intent to figuratively bludgeon you with a textbook or rap your knuckles with a yardstick.

Due to a push for gender equality, the pronoun “he”—and its brothers, “his” and “him”—are rarely accepted anymore as talking about an unidentified person. That’s fine; I don’t have as much of a problem with that. It’s the fact that since in English we don’t have a neutral singular pronoun, people instead have introduced “they,” “their,” and “them” as the substitute to avoid the clunky “he or she.”

The cure is worse than the disease.

Take this line from a recent email:

“Do a Colleague a Favor, Invite Them to Join STC.”

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Recently I worked on a mission statement for our user education team because I’ve tackled that kind of thing before. We want something that we can measure ourselves against to see how we’re doing in our role. Our organization has its stated mission, and our department has a vision as given by our CIO.

In a department meeting yesterday, he demonstrated a project that’s in the works, and he showed us a “purpose statement” that goes along with the project’s rationale and background work. I think I like that wording better than “mission statement” because it gets closer to the heart of things. A purpose is at the root of a mission.

What’s in a mission statement? To me, the term “mission statement” carries connotations of inflated language and feel-good rhetoric. It belongs coupled with a scenic photograph in a frame. With this attitude, it’s hard to take it seriously when you task yourself (or someone else tasks you) with writing one. We did some brainstorming as a team about what our purposes and aims are, and then I took the results and took a first shot at putting them together.

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When you read something, do you hear the writer’s voice in your head?

That is, when you actually know what the writer’s voice sounds like.

I remember an assignment in a college writing theory class in which I had to discuss whether I have an inner voice when I read. I asserted that I do, one of my supporting points being that when I’m reading silently and come across a word I don’t know how to pronounce, I recognize that I don’t know how to pronounce it. If I were reading with no voice speaking in my head, I wouldn’t care about pronunciation.

I just wondered a few days ago whether I hear a coworker’s voice when reading her email or his IM. I think my inner reading voice isn’t even my own voice; it’s pretty neutral, while my speaking voice is in the bass range. It’s a similar voice, I think, when I’m reading coworkers’ messages. But still, I think there’s a hint of the person’s voice there.

Come to think of it, I don’t even think my thoughts are in my own voice, but rather in that same neutral voice. It calls into question the show and movie where someone’s thoughts are broadcast audibly, and people can recognize the voice. I wonder if that would really be the case. Since an unspoken thought doesn’t go through your vocal cords, how can it have your physical voice?

Okay, I’m done. Just one of those writing-related things that I started thinking about.

I mentioned the other day that I was working on some quick-start guides that a stakeholder asked for in our training structure. When he described something that he had in mind, I said to myself, “Quick-start guide.” This deliverable takes a different mindset than help systems or other types of documentation. I’ve decided that quick-start guides and quick-reference sheets must be a minimalist’s dream.

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When you’re reading over your documentation, does it sound like a robot wrote it? I’m sure mine does.

One of the benefits of starting on a new project is that I can try out new things. This time around, one of those things will be a more relaxed style using contractions. I thought of this because when I’m writing other things, such as a journal entry or creative piece, I tend to use contractions. They’re a natural part of speaking. So as I was writing some help, I started to include some contractions without even thinking about it.

I caught myself, but I asked Tom’s opinion on the subject. He’s in favor of using contractions in documentation, making the point that when you have a frustrated user, he or she is going to want to talk to a person, not a robot. Therefore, make your documentation sound like it comes from a real person.

Something like using contractions is so simple, but I got the idea from somewhere that contractions are illegal in formal writing (must have been in kindergarten—I think that’s where I learned everything that I can’t remember where I learned it). I’m going to let myself write more naturally and see if that results in more user-friendly help.

Then I, with Pinocchio, will be able to say, “I’m a real boy!”

This topic has been knocking around in my head for a while now, so it’s about time to post about it.

One of the limitations of the written word is that we lose meaning as compared to in-person interaction. According to one of my college textbooks, Looking Out / Looking In by Adler and Towne, social scientists peg the amount of meaning we derive from body language at 65%. We also take a lot of meaning from vocal tone. We leave about 9% for the words themselves.

Writing does have voice and tone, but they’re not the same as in speech. Still, writing can carry emotion to the point that you can tell the writer’s mood. Writers have to be careful.

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I recently finished reading Word Wizard, a collection of essays by Richard Lederer. (If you’ve ever been forwarded the email that asks why if we say “tooth” and “teeth,” why don’t we pluralize “booth” as “beeth,” Lederer’s the guy who wrote those musings.) Two of the essays struck me as ironic, but it’s likely that I noticed the irony only because the two pieces were placed near each other in the book.

One is called “Cut the Verbal Fat,” and the other, “Add Wealth to your Vocabulary.”

They seem contradictory at first glance. But are they?

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