Tips and Insights

I like words . . . like their possibilities, their elusiveness, like how I can deliberately manipulate them, like how the same words can mean different things to different people.

I also like how different organizations make it a point to identify new expressions that should or should not come into our language. For instance, the American Dialect Society (ADS) celebrates new additions and chose plutoed as their 2006 Word of the Year, which means "to demote or devalue someone or something." You know, like the planet that's no longer a planet.

Lake Superior State University, however, likes to identify the words we need to banish, often for their overuse or superficial nature. Included on their 2007 List of Banished Words are Gitmo, awesome, boasts and last year's ADS winner truthiness. (Check out their reasons for banishment. If you're a word nerd like me, you'll find them funny.)

Of course at Bishop, we can't play with words when we're writing standard work instructions. Our job is to make our words-the few we choose to use-as explicit as possible.

This type of brevity and clarity also finds a place in a wordsmith's heart. I like having to figure out how to tighten a phrase or cluster information to fit in a list. Both challenge my mind and my skills, and though I may be generalizing, I don't believe most lawyers or auditors aspire to such simplicity. I suspect that's why traditional procedure manuals are filled with verbiage. (Before any lawyers contact me and complain, let me say that I do know a plain language movement is afoot, and, thankfully, a committee with the State Bar of Michigan is promoting it. Now, if we can just get everyone to actually use it. . . .)

Over the next few weeks, I'll share some of the editorial reasons and techniques behind our visual work instructions, and talk about the ways illustrations affect our decisions.

Labels: clarity, plain language, procedure manuals, work instructions