Writing, Clear and Simple

A simple proposition with much complexity: Words mean things. Well, of course they do, otherwise we’d use some other method of communicating. Interpretive dance, perhaps.

When you write or speak, keep in mind that a word’s meaning can be a complex thing because it can have at least two layers of meaning: denotation and connotation.

Denotation is " the most specific or literal meaning of a word." It’s what you find when you look it up in the dictionary. Connotation, on the other hand, is "an additional sense or senses associated with or suggested by a word or phrase." (Source: Encarta Dictionary.) A word’s meaning in both the denotative and connotative sense can shift over time, but the connotations of a word can change far more rapidly, as illustrated by the saga of that simple four-letter word, suck.

Bottom line: know your audience. A term might be fine for one but inflammatory for another.  Computer programmers have no problem talking about aborting a process, but you could easilly annoy some people if you use the word abort carelessly in other contexts. When in doubt, leave it out.

"You must be aware that your reader is at least as bright as you are."

—William Maxwell

When do you use its and when do you use it’s? This is one that tripped me up for quite a while, mostly because I just threw the words onto the page without thinking about them. Thus, I frequently ended up writing things like "The dog chased it’s tail," which doesn’t make any sense at all.  

<digression>"What’s the big deal? People will understand what you’re saying from the context, right?" OK, take it for granted that a given percentage of your readers don’t know the difference, and won’t notice it if you use its when you mean it’s, and vice versa. I have no idea how large that percentage is, but for sake of argument, let’s say it’s as large as 50%. That means that the other half of your audience does know the difference, and every time you use the wrong word, they’ll notice it. And they’ll begin to think you’re a bit stupid to keep making elementary mistakes like that. So it doesn’t matter if you don’t care that half of your readers think you’re stupid. And if they think you’re stupid, they won’t be your readers for much longer, so who cares what they think? Right? </digression>

I think people tend to mix its and it’s up because they’re used to using apostrophes to make words possessive. That was my problem. Ordinarily, "Add ’s to make a word possessive" is a perfectly good rule, until you forget that apostrophes are also used in contractions, and that there’s a class of words known as possessive pronouns (such as my, your, her, his, its) that don’t need the apostrophe.

Just remember that it’s is a contraction for "it is" (and occassionally "it has") and the "apostrophe is performing its normal duty of showing that one or more letters have been omitted," as Sir Ernest Gowers says. Its is the possessive form of the pronoun it. (Hint: Remember that its is just like another possessive pronoun that ends in s with no apostrophe: his.

In short:
"It’s" is "it is;" "its" isn’t.

If you still have trouble remembering when to use its or it’s, try this: If you can replace the word with "it is," use the contraction, it’s. If the sentence would still make sense if you replaced it with another possessive pronoun such as his or her, (for example, "The dog chased her tail,") then use its.

In The Elements of Style, William Strunk and E.B. White illustrated the difference between these words this way: "It’s a wise dog that scratches its own fleas."

I receive an e-mail newsletter called "Early to Rise," and in the latest issue, Will Newman offers this advice about paragraph length:

… forget what your English teachers taught you about paragraphs. If you write the way they taught you - with a topic sentence, three or more supporting details, and conclusions all wrapped up in one paragraph - you’ll lose your prospective customer. [Or reader. RJ] 

Long paragraphs look dense … and hard to read. And if your copy looks hard to read, it will not get read. And there goes your sale.

Good sales paragraphs are short paragraphs. Try to keep them to no more than four lines (not sentences, but lines). They should never be longer than six lines. Break them at logical places so they make sense.

This is true in my experience in technical writing. Readers (myself included) tend to be intimidated by or get bogged down in long paragraphs. The same can be said of sentences.

Now don’t think of "short is good" as a hard and fast rule. As Captain Barbossa said about the Pirate’s Code, "… the Code is more what you’d call "guidelines" than actual rules." If a paragraph or sentence is getting long, look for logical ways to break it in two (or maybe even three) pieces.

"Let every man take care how he talks, or how he writes of other men, and not set down at random, higgle-de-piggledy, whatever comes into his noddle."

—Cervantes