be
intr.v.
 echnical
writing competes successfully with "legalese" as the
most awful form of
literature. Sentences slog along, fact after
fact. Paragraphic
sludge, thick and cold, mires the mind in data and more
data. Detailed
descriptions appear in viscous rivers. Bogs of
operating procedures
fill pages. References, forward and reverse,
tangle and distract
the hapless reader, who gropes through illustrations
bereft of life.
Here and there a dreary signpost, then resumes the
mental death-march,
fact after fact.
Everyone in technical work has to read the stuff. Most must write it, too. Technology in industry, in government, in academia -- technology nam et ipsa means documentation. What makes it so awful? Formality, of course. Technical writing sets the standard for dryness, inertness -- formality to the max. Formality: rampart for the insecure, the mindless fact-monger, the flattened, humorless, literal personality. At the microcosmic level, the real culprit is is. And other forms of the verb to be, like are, was, and were. Let me illustrate. The following passage contains nine incidents of be: The bicycle is the most efficient means of personal transportation. Its principal parts are wheels, frame, handlebar, saddle, pedals, cranks, sprockets, chain, and brakes. The rider is seated upon the saddle, which is located atop the frame.Technical writing sounds like that. Notice what the writer might accomplish partly as a consequence of taking out all forms of be. The bicycle holds primacy as the most efficient means of personal transportation. Imagine all the places a person can go on a machine which rolls along on just a pair of wheels. Sure, you need pedals and cranks, sprocket and chain, but you don't need gasoline. Add a saddle and a handlebar, and nothing can stop you. Oh, right, don't forget the brakes.The more active style makes for better reading, perhaps you will agree. I call it Be-Free English (BFE). Now, I admit, the writer of that BFE version did not limit himself to the removal of the is's and are's. Golly, for one thing, I deliberately broke a solemn rule of technical writing: Never use a personal pronoun. Try BFE for yourself. But do not expect an easy job of it. Figure twice the writing effort. If you want to write fast, let the be's fall where they may. Glazed eyes do not cause a reader's death, only characterize it. But if you want to write something less awful -- a document the reader will comprehend without conking out -- put Be-Free English to work for you.
Forcing myself to remove the was in a statement such as "The war was over" (sense 4d) stimulates a quest for specificity, as: "The war ended {on such-and-such a date, with the battle of so-and-so, in a stalemate, without bloodshed}." Better no predicate at all than a mere be, sometimes. Then too, I took a disliking to that "equal in meaning" business (sense 5a). Nothing is truly equal in meaning (see analogy, restitution). I learned long ago that when I do not allow statements of equivalence (with an is or a was), I find myself seeking differentiation instead, and the thought expands, the expression gains content. Examples abound. Rather than "Eisenhower was President," I might say "Eisenhower occupied the White House." An ironic inaction thereby takes over the sentence, replacing existential -- hmm, inaction. "She was his most devoted admirer," transforms to: "She admired him greatly," connoting volition and leaving whatever else "she was" for separate elaboration. Some constructs in English require a be to -- well, to be (sense 3, 4, 5b, 5c, 6b, 6c, and 6d). Often, save for tortured rewriting, no alternative exists. I have found that budgeting about one or two be's per page relieves the struggle. By the way, a be works best with a "not," as in: "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." However, such a case is not exactly a refutation of my be-antipathy, since a negative formulation is not an instance of "equal in meaning." So be-free writing is not without exceptions. Finally, the Foremost in Awfulness: the Passive Voice (sense 6a), the polluter of formal writing. When the Passive Voice is employed, the resulting sentence is made -- surprise! -- passive. Today, we might say wimpish. If you want to sound inactive, use the Passive Voice. In technical writing or otherwise, I don't so I don't. Of course, you cannot use the Passive Voice without a be in there somewhere. For more than three decades now I have talked about Be-Free English to anyone who will listen and to some who had no other choice (subordinates, for example). I taught BFE in the university and in seminars around the country as a footnote to other subjects, mostly technical, of course. Not a well-kept secret, by any means. More than a third of a century has gone
by and I have
yet to hear about BFE from anybody else. But I
haven't found a sentence
that actually improves with the inclusion of a be
either.
|
ack
in the fifties, fresh from the university and
immediately assailed by technical
writing in my first job, I began doing that. By
simply excising a
few be's, I found I could develop improved
diction. With increased
action, I achieved improved imagination with no loss
in relevance.
The technique works on non-technical writing,
too. For the record,
my first draft of the present essay began "Technical
writing is
awful."