Good writers, not-so-good writers, incredible writers—we're all unsure sometimes. Here are a few clues that a writer is not comfortable, and some tips for avoiding these ruts.
The word disparate.1 This word means unlike or different. I see unsure writers using it to mean various. It's not necessarily incorrect, but it's an odd choice. When I see a sentence like People throughout the company use disparate toolchains and methodologies, I wonder if the writer was uncomfortable just saying People throughout the company work in different ways. It's a contortion2 that probably stems from genre pressure.3 It's also a five-dollar word. If you want your writing to exude sure-footed confidence, try various or different instead.
The word comprise.4 Of course, you are not the problem. You, dear reader, know that comprise means to be made up of, and you would never say something is comprised of several parts. You always use comprise correctly, and no one in your audience questions the meaning. But comprise, at best, smacks of the relentless pursuit of "concision" above understanding. There are many other ways to say comprise, some of them embodied in single words, that convey the same meaning more naturally.
The relentless pursuit of "concision5" above understanding. People who value brevity over effectiveness would never be caught dead using the friendlier word conciseness. Being concise is important. Some people would call it getting to the point. But once it becomes a higher goal than the point itself, the writing devolves from a joyful carriage of ideas to an exercise in information stuffing.
"This document will…" At a loss for how to take that first bite of a blank page, I, too, have typed the magic words in this paper, I will show or this page describes or this section covers… The writers who later edit that part out show a steadier hand than those who leave it in. As an experiment, next time you finish a piece of writing, try deleting the entire first paragraph.
Overloaded sentences. One of the most common ways to overload a sentence is to cram in all the relationships your topic offers, tacking on indirect objects and dependent clauses as you go. I recently came across a sentence very much like this one:
Partners and customers who use our online store can leverage the following capabilities to connect their accounts with the account and customer management features that help their teams manage their work across tools more efficiently with our web portal as the account management hub.
That is a dump truck of a sentence. You can't lightly rephrase your way out of something like that. You have to start over:
Our account management hub provides features our customers and partners can use to help their teams. The following capabilities help connect their customers to our tools, making it easier for everyone to work together.
Talk to marketing and see if I got the meaning right, but the point is to break up the sentence into smaller pieces, turning the dump trucks back into joyful carriages.
Wiggle words. When I see generally or in most cases or even due to the fact that, I wonder how much the writer really believes what they've written. When is generally, which cases, and why not say because? You can strike nearly all of these words and phrases from your writing without losing an iota6 of meaning.
Numbers instead of bullets. A numbered list is for things that have an order to them, such as steps in a procedure or events that happened a certain way. You can also use a numbered list for things you need to refer to individually later. But the unsure writer uses them where bullets would be better, as if to say I told you there were three following things, here they are, count them yourself and tell me I wasn't right!
Contortions to avoid informality or "bad grammar." Afraid of not writing "well enough," the unsure writer7 uses the writer instead of you or rearranges entire sentences to keep prepositions away from the end. You don't have to do this. The end of a sentence is a perfect place to put a preposition at. You can split infinitives, use the passive voice, and forget about whom. The hallmark of a confident writer is clarity and simplicity, not adherence to real or imagined rules.
To show your competence through confidence: write simple, clear sentences. When in doubt, write the way you talk.
From dis- (apart) and parare (prepare). See Separate, Apart.
I'm coining this for grammatical and stylistic acrobatics utilized to avoid a simpler construction.
From comprehendere (gather together) and related to comprehend. Let me know if I should write something up about these words.
You already know an iota is a very small amount, such as a jot. But iota and jot are different ways of spelling the ninth letter of the Greek alphabet. Since it's the smallest letter, it was used to mean a small amount. See Merriam-Webster.
I would have said you if I’d meant you.