Tuesday, February 23, 2010
Elegance in Technical Communications
For a technical writer or editor, elegance is inextricably linked with clarity in written communications. Elegance incorporates both content and style. An elegant communications piece both informs and maintains a reader's attention through its attention to sentence balance, coordination, and word choice. In certain situations, an elegant piece will be rhetorically sophisticated, with nominalizations providing ballast. In other situations, an elegant piece will be technologically sophisticated, with hypertextual opportunities to extend a conversation. Most importantly a sense of purpose, audience and content will govern the approach taken in choosing a stylized, or elegant, approach to writing.
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I agree. Elegance and clarity are two sides of the same coin, definitely. That, I suppose, is what makes our job so difficult. Don't want just the facts all the time. Want some "style," right?
ReplyDeleteI like nominalizations as "ballast." Is that from Williams? (If so, I missed it) What a wonderful metaphor -- it instantly provides some perspective on Williams concept of "weight" in a sentence.
ReplyDeleteI too like the concept of nominalizations as ballast.
ReplyDeleteElegance and clarity and interwoven. If a piece is not clear, would the reader find it elegant? I find something that is difficult to understand cumbersome and unpleasant, not elegant.
Williams speaks of agent-subject structures as the "anchor" of a sentence(38). I like nautical metaphors since they imply movement and stability.
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