Improving Technical and Bureaucratic Writing

Abstract

This article emphasizes four syntactic-rhetorical imperatives which make written messages easier to read. 1. Keep subjects and their verbs close together. Since native speakers of English expect verbs to follow subjects closely, any intervening element makes the processing of information difficult. The longer the intervening element, the more difficult the comprehension of the message. 2. Use appropriate prepositions between nouns to explicitly indicate their semantic relationships. Long nominal phrases are hard to understand because these implicit relationships create ambiguity. What compounds the difficulty of the message is that all the nouns in the phrase, except the last one, assume the function normal to adjectives namely, modification. 3. Help readers to segment syntactic units correctly. The obstacles to readability in this area are the omission of commas and of the signals of subordination, and the misplacement of modifiers. 4. Match textual sequence with chronological sequence. If the sequence of the events does not match the sequence of their reporting in a piece of technical writing, that piece of expository prose is bound to communicate poorly.