Author: Brian J. Noggle

After a period of time at the start-up for whom I work, I’ve decided it’s time to create a style guide. With the revenue sugarplums dancing in our heads, maybe I can convince the assorted VPs of our need to hire a second technical writer eventually. A style guide would help break in, or maybe just break, the untamed new person. No longer would he or she struggle against the bridle of “Do it because I do it that way.” The style guide offers me the cover of “Do it because it’s in the style guide” (because I do it that way and put it in the style guide that way). Too much exposure to the marketers, and suddenly I am crafty.

So, instead of relying upon guidance from previous employers, which meant falling into the “Do it because it’s in the style guide” (because I do it that way because all of my previous employers did it that way, so I put it in the style guide that way) trap, I struck out to research style guides, delving into the obscure and Byzantine style guides developed by true geniuses in their fields.

Some of the results startled me.

Ever had to look over a press release devised by your marketing department? Or worse, have you seen them in print and wondered what fluke or computer virus introduced random capitalization into their text? It’s no fluke. Here’s the exact rule, courtesy of the Emily Dickinson Style Guide for Prose Writers:

4.5 proper Capitalization in sentences or Fragments

When Writing, use Judiciously your friend the Capital Letter to add emphasis to Common nouns, adjectives, and verbs to discriminate and add Emphasis to Key Concepts.

Before I discovered this, I had suspected I uncovered an instance of someone hacking apart a sentence devised with the camelBackNotationMethod, favored by developers for method and attribute names. Little did I know it was codified! Forget the bold and italics offered by modern convenience when you have the Capital letter.

Sometimes, unfortunately often when proofreading my own work, I come across that sentence that features not only a dangling modifier, but a dangling everything. You know, the sort of

I usually expect the writer has been deflected from his or her duty, whether a subject matter expert had to actually write some software, a salesman had to actually cold-call a potential client, or an overworked technical writer actually had to play defense in the important mid-morning foosball game. I understand how hard it can be to pick up where you left off, if you can even remember that you left off in the first place. So I often excused the offender with a pointed bit of Nogglesque humor that has alienated me from peers everywhere. That is, however, until I encountered the Official Manual of William Carlos Williams Style:

Sentences and pro
per breaks
So much depends
upon the brea
king point of your sentences and lines.

Judic
ious use of improper grammatic
al constructions lends
itself to
greater reader comprehension as
the greater reader paus
es to ponder
the interface.

As you can see, people who prefer this style guide want their sentences to wander off down the misty street like the end of a noir movie. This style empowers the end reader with more questions than answers, and formulating questions starts the learning process. A bit heady for me personally, but the style exists, and resides in 10 point Helvetica somewhere.

I even found the software developer’s favorite guide, the Elements of Riboflavin Style. The popular Riboflavin Style of writing is that to include the verb “to be” two times each to be clearer. Before this, I assumed it was weak writing, but now I know that the Riboflavin Style is officially sanctioned and that it leads to a healthy manual metabolism and mucous membranes in the gizzard.

My research yielded a harvest more fruity than my wildest imaginings. Essentially, I can carve my own foibles, such as overuse of the word “Judicious” just because it sounds like a combination of Judicial and Delicious, into the style guide. Once I compose it, I can rest assured the style guide will stand, a HumaBrian Stone for the masses, or for the technical writer or intern I can acquire. The style guide will exist not just for now, but for all time, or at least until half way through my farewell luncheon, or until someone has a better idea.

Doh! In this week’s issue, The Onion misquotes Alex Rogan, the main character of The Last Starfighter. The Onion’s take is this:

Continued Bush: “Or, as Alex says to [his girlfriend] Maggie, ‘Don’t you see this is it? This is our big chance. It’s like, whatever this is, when it comes, you’ve got to grab on with both hands and hold tight.'”

But he really says: “It’s like what Otis says….” Earlier in the movie, Otis, wizened and wisened resident within the trailer park, did give him that very advice.

Oh, sure, maybe the writer can claim that the joke is that it was Bush, the “pretender president,” who made another one of his characteristic blunders. But I think the writer was playing slops with the cult culture of geeks and banked number four off of the eight ball, a bumper, and the thirteen ball without dropping it in the side pocket.

You Onion guys used to have geek cred when you were in Madison, but since you’ve gone to New York, you’ve gotten taken in by the glamour of the east coast and you ain’t down with us here in the heartland no more.

(The doctors say I can overcome my dementia trivia with a prescription, but I declined.)

Honey, I know you recently found a pair of your nice slacks hanging in the closet in a state you characterized as “inside-out.” However, I want to assure you that this must be by design, for I read the manual that came with these slacks, and I laundered them precisely according to the concise directions provided by my technical communication counterpart at his or her own sweatshop of indenture.

The user’s guide, or perhaps administrator’s guide (as I was not so much using as maintaining the slacks), directed me to:

• Turn garment inside out
• Machine wash cold with like colors only non-chlorine bleach when needed
• Tumble dry low
• Remove promptly
• Warm iron on reverse when needed

My fellow technical writer, the composer of this particular guide, undoubtedly broke down the complete process of laundering this garment and rendered this process in a step-by-step fashion easily consumable by the greatest laundry novice, of which I assure you I am not, for I have learned from the many mistakes I have made, such as washing the new St. Louis Cardinals tee shirt in the light load. No, the greatest laundry novice has yet to learn that lesson.

As a professional courtesy, I cannot even doubt that this documentation specialist would leave out important maintenance steps in this process. When developers compile documentation, they often operate with assumptions not readily apparent to the end user. For example, saying “Search for the record” is shorthand for:

1. Type a search term or terms into the Search for edit box. You can use the * wildcard in this search to indicate an incomplete string or the ? wildcard to indicate a single character that can represent any character in that position in the string.
2. From the Record Type drop-down list, select the type of record for which you want to search.
3. From the By Date radio buttons, click either From this date….

Well, you get the idea.

With this respect for my counterpart in mind, I must point out that although the instructions indicate that the slacks administrator should turn the garment inside out, at no point do the instructions direct the administrator to once again toggle the setting of the interior/exterior aspect position. As I indicated, were it a developer who wrote this procedure, I might entertain the notion that the step was merely assumed. However, I defer to the technical writing authority.

Of course, the fact that the instructions do not say turn garment inside in represents a marvelous innovation in slacks technology. I concentrated, using the ancient technique of Docus Ficta (Find The Feature In The Omission or Defect) which learned when I studied the Dark Forbidden Arts of Technical Writing in the verdant jungles of Cambodia (right down the road from those whacky guys at Angkor Wat who kept hitting their softballs over our fence and interrupting the meditations of we technical writing initiates to throw the softballs back). Of course!

By alternating the exposure of both the interior and exterior surfaces of the garment, the user will experience more even wear upon the fabric, increasing up to 100% the life of the garment. No wonder this garment maker is the leader in the industry. Undoubtedly, it has filed a patent protecting this intellectual property. If not, certainly an entrepreneural dumpster-diving spirit like me will poach it.

I am sorry to have to bring this squabble up publicly, dear, when all four of our readers can see it. However, you must now agree that the “inside out” nature of the slacks within the closet was not a mistake, but the direct result of intelligent information design. Even though I might shame you by this display, I promise I shall make it up to you by doing something special, such as ironing your slacks. I will, once I figure out which setting of the iron is reverse; the switch doesn’t have a little R.