BASIC PROSE STYLE

1. Write in the Active Voice

Unless you have a good reason to do otherwise, always choose the active, rather than the passive, voice. With the active voice, the agent (the person or thing carrying out the action expressed by the verb) is the subject:

John opened the door.

There are two types of passive voice constructions. In one, the agent is identified, but the person or thing toward which the action is directed (rather than the agent) is the subject of the sentence:

The door was opened by John.

In the second type of passive voice construction, the agent is not identified at all:

The door was opened.

(Note: The verb "to be" [am, is, are, was, were, be, being, been] often flags the passive voice.)

In addition to being less natural, less direct, and less vigorous, sentences that fail to identify an agent can raise ethical questions, since they fail to attribute responsibility for the action they express. The passive voice can, however, be an effective means of doing at least three things:

a. Focusing attention on the thing acted upon:

The bus was destroyed by a freight train.

b. Describing action when the agent is unknown or unimportant:

The building was demolished over fifteen years ago.

c. Placing the agent at the end of a clause where he, she, or it can more easily be modified by a long modifier:

The house was built by John Hanson, who went on, years later, to become president of the Continental Congress.

Many science and technical writers once considered passive voice more objective than active voice and, hence, more appropriate to their writing. As the quotations below suggest, however, the traditional preference for passive voice in scientific and technical writing is changing:

We cannot object to this use of the passive construction in itself. We can object to its abuse--to use almost to the exclusion of all other constructions. When the passive is used as a rule, not as an exception to obtain a particular effect, writing soon begins to seem forced and uncomfortable.

-- John Kirkman, Good Style: Writing for Science and Technology

The active is the natural voice, the one in which people usually speak or write, and its use is less likely to lead to wordiness or ambiguity. The passive of modesty, a device of writers who shun the first-person singular, should be avoided. I discovered is shorter and less likely to be ambiguous than it was discovered. The use of I or we. . .avoids dangling participles, common in sentences written in the third-person passive.

-- Council of Biology Editors, CBE Style Manual, 5th ed.

[Passive voice] implies that events take place without any one doing anything. Moves files, desks, and ideas without any assistance from a human being. Makes readers wonder whether they should be doing something or just sitting there waiting for the system to perform. It turns actions into states of being. It's somewhat mystical, but tends to put readers to sleep. . . .

To get more active, say who does what. Assign responsibility to the system or to the program or, if necessary, to the reader. If you have to tell readers to do something, don't pussyfoot around--tell them. (Are you slipping into the passive because you don't dare to order readers around?)

-- Jonathan Price, How to Write a Computer Manual

2. Avoid Nominalizations

Unless you have a good reason to do otherwise, avoid nominalizations. A nominalization is a noun derived from and communicating the same meaning as a verb or adjective. It is usually more direct, vigorous and natural to express action in verbs and qualities in adjectives.

no: Our expectation was that we would be rewarded for our efforts.

yes: We expected to be rewarded for our efforts.

no: There was a stuffiness about the room.

yes: The room was stuffy.

Nominalizations frequently crop up in noun strings. A noun string, a series of nouns that modify one another, is often concise but ambiguous. If the noun string is short, it can usually be tamed with a few judicious hyphens:

no: The test area probes were delivered last week.

yes: The test-area probes were delivered last week.

Longer noun strings, however, are often confusing, and it is generally best to unstring them by converting nominalizations back to verbs or by adding a few strategic articles and prepositions:

no: Missile guidance center office equipment maintenance is performed weekly.

yes: The office equipment in the missile guidance center is maintained weekly.

Like passive voice, nominalizations can serve some useful purposes:

a. Nominalizations can facilitate smooth transitions between sentences by serving as subjects that refer back to ideas in previous sentences:

Susan refused to accept the five-stroke handicap. Ultimately, this refusal cost her the match.

b. Nominalizations can be effective when you choose to desensitize a statement by converting the more vigorous and direct verb form into the less vigorous and direct noun form. Thus,

He is scheduled to be executed on Monday.

becomes

His execution is scheduled for Monday.

c. Since nouns often name material things, they have a certain status in our culture, where the concrete often seems more real (hence, more credible) than the abstract. Therefore, although nominalizations often result in pompous and convoluted prose, they occasionally can be used to make the abstract seem more concrete and, perhaps, more convincing. Thus,

The colonists would not tolerate being taxed.

becomes

The colonists would not tolerate taxation.

Joseph Williams neatly sums up these first two principles (write in the active voice and avoid nominalizations): "Try to state who's doing what in the subject of your sentence, and try to state what that who is doing in your verb. . . . Get that straight, and the rest of the sentence begins to fall into place" (Style, 1st ed., p. 8)

3. Express Parallel Ideas in Parallel Grammatical Form

Parallelism is the principle that units of equal function should be expressed in equal form. Repetition of the same structure allows the reader to recognize parallel ideas more readily:

no: This could be a problem for both the winners and for those who lose.

yes: This could be a problem for both the winners and the losers.

no: Output from VM appears in the output display area. The input area is where commands typed by the user are displayed.

yes: Output from VM appears in the output display area. Commands typed by the user appear in the input display area.

Note that any two (or more) units of discourse--words, phrases, clauses, sentences, paragraphs, chapters--can be made parallel with one another. Note also that, although it is a powerful rhetorical device, parallelism is only one of many factors writers must consider as they compose. Hence, parallelism is occasionally overridden by other, more pressing considerations, such as clarity and variety.

4. Place the Emphatic Words at the End of the Sentence

Joseph Williams offers two complementary principles of order and emphasis (Style, 1st ed.):

1. Whenever possible, express at the beginning of a sentence ideas already stated, referred to, implied, safely assumed, familiar--whatever might be called old, repeated, relatively predictable, less important, readily accessible information.

2. Express at the end of a sentence the least predictable, least accessible, the newest, the most significant and striking information.

no: Peter Laslett writes about how family structure has changed in his article, "The World We Have Lost."

yes: In his article, "The World We Have Lost," Peter Laslett writes about how family structure has changed.

In the first version, the emphasis is on the title of the article; in the second version, the emphasis is on the substance of the article. Note that according to the two principles above, what justly needs emphasis in a sentence generally depends upon what has already been said or what is already known; that is, upon the given information. When the given information is placed at the beginning of a sentence, it is understated and serves as a transition or introduction to the new information in the sentence, which is thereby emphasized.

What Haviland and Clark call the "Given-New Strategy" not only creates proper emphasis within a sentence, it also creates cohesion between sentences since the new information of one sentence often becomes the given (or old) information of the next. Schematically, the movement of given to new information in a series of sentences might look like this:

AB. BC. CD. DE

Look, for example, at the following pair of sentences:

Lines that contain printer-control characters will not look right-justified on your screen. They will be right-justified, however, when you print them.

In the first sentence, the given information is lines (A), and the new information is right-justified (B). In the second sentence, the given information is right-justified (B), and the new information is when you print them (C).

Although the end of the sentence is generally the most emphatic position, as Strunk and White point out in The Elements of Style, "The other prominent position in the sentence is the beginning. Any element in the sentence other than the subject becomes emphatic when placed first: Deceit or treachery he could not forgive."

A little bit of this inverted style, however, goes a long way-use it sparingly.

5. Express Statements in Positive Form

The positive form of a statement is generally more concise and straightforward than the negative:

no: Don't write in the negative.

yes: Write in the affirmative.

no: Disengagement of the gears is not possible without locking mechanism release.

yes: To disengage the gears, you must first release the locking mechanism.

As Joseph Williams points out, "To understand the negative, we have to translate it into an affirmative, because the negative only implies what we should do by telling us what we shouldn't do. The affirmative states it directly" (Style, 1st ed.).

Williams goes on to point out that we needn't translate every negative into an affirmative, for (as this sentence illustrates) we sometimes have a special reason to emphasize not, no, or never. The negative is especially effective when used as a means of denial, contradiction, or antithesis:

Ask not what your country can do for you--ask what you can do for your country.

6. Vary Sentence Patterns

A series of sentences that follow the same general pattern (e.g., a series of three or four simple sentences or a series of three or four compound sentences) can be tedious. Avoid monotony by varying sentence patterns.

One of the best ways to avoid a tedious series of simple sentences is to use subordination (or embedding) to combine the information presented in these sentences into a single, complex sentence. For example,

FLIST is a utility program used to assist in file management. FLIST displays a scrollable, full-screen list of selected files. The user may execute any CMS command from this list.

becomes

FLIST, a utility program used to manage files, displays a scrollable, full-screen list of selected files from which the user may execute any CMS command.

Another way to avoid a series of simple sentences is to use coordination (the tying together of language elements that have equal rank, such as independent clauses) to combine several of these sentences into a single, compound sentence. For example,

You can initialize CADAM from any System E terminal. You can invoke CADAM only from the 3178 terminals.

becomes

You can initialize CADAM from any System E terminal, but you can invoke CADAM only from the 3178 terminals.

Compound and complex sentences can themselves, however, become tedious. And sometimes, they're just plain awkward or confusing. Don't overload your sentences or your readers. If you find a sentence is becoming too long and confusing, or if you've used three or four complex sentences in a row, reverse the process described above and break your sentence up into several shorter sentences.

Note that although sentence variety is illustrated here only in terms of sentence type, this same principle applies to other sentence features, such as sentence openings and sentence length.

One of the best ways to discover problems with sentence variety is to read your writing aloud. Human language is primarily oral/aural and only secondarily graphic/visual; hence, most of us have a better ear for language than we have an eye for it. In fact, reading your writing aloud can help you discover problems not only with sentence variety but also with order and emphasis, parallelism, coherence, redundancy, syntax, rhythm, and grammar.

7. Choose Your Words Carefully

Linguists estimate that the English language includes over one million words, thus providing English speakers with the largest lexicon in the world. From this vast lexicon, writers may choose the precise words to meet their needs. The list below describes some of the factors you might consider in choosing, from among a number of synonyms or near synonyms, the word or phrase most appropriate to your purpose. Notice that the distinctions between these factors are not always sharp; some might properly be considered subsets of others. For example, tone, formality, and intensity might be considered subsets of connotation.

a. Connotation: While the literal or explicit meaning of a word or phrase is its denotation, the suggestive or associative implication of a word or phrase is its connotation. Words often have similar denotations but quite different connotations (due to etymology, common usage, suggestion created by similar-sounding words, etc.); hence, you might choose or avoid a word because of its connotation. For example, although one denotation of rugged is "strongly built or constituted," the connotation is generally masculine; hence, you might choose to describe an athletic woman as athletic rather than rugged. Likewise, although one denotation of pretty is "having conventionally accepted elements of beauty," the connotation is generally feminine; thus, most men would probably prefer being referred to as handsome.

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