Field notes

Writing tips that survive contact with deadlines

This page continues a tradition of the old site at this domain: short, practical notes on the mechanics of technical and business writing. No theory — just the calls editors make all day.

Acronyms and abbreviations

• Spell out on first use, acronym in parentheses — then use the acronym consistently. If a term appears only twice, don't abbreviate it at all.
• Long documents get a list of abbreviations in the front matter; the first-use rule then applies per chapter, because nobody reads chapter 6 remembering chapter 2.
• An acronym the reader must decode is worse than the three words it saved. "The QAPP references the SAP and the HASP" is a sentence only its author can love.

Numbers

• Most technical styles: words for zero through nine, numerals for 10 and up — but always numerals with units (3 mm, 5%), and never start a sentence with a numeral.
• Keep precision honest. Reporting 12.847% from a measurement good to whole percentage points isn't accuracy, it's costume.
• In tables, align decimal points and repeat the unit in the column head, not in every cell.

Hyphens and their relatives

• Hyphenate compound modifiers before the noun (a high-pressure line) but not after (the line is high pressure), and never after an ‑ly adverb (a highly effective method).
• En dash for ranges (2019–2024, pages 10–14); em dash — like this — for the break in thought. Word's autocorrect gets ranges wrong constantly; check them.

Usage calls that come up every week

• which / that: that restricts ("the pump that failed"), which adds an aside ("the pump, which was installed in 2019"). If you can drop the clause without changing the meaning, use which and a comma.
• affect / effect: to affect is to influence; an effect is a result. (The verb effect, as in "effect a change," is usually a sign the sentence wants rewriting.)
• comprise / compose: the whole comprises the parts; the parts compose the whole. "Comprised of" is always wrong and always survives review — search for it explicitly.
• ensure / insure / assure: you ensure an outcome, insure a car, and assure a person.
• i.e. / e.g.: i.e. means "that is"; e.g. means "for example." Both take a following comma and belong in parentheses, not in running prose.

Style guides: pick one and obey it

Half of all editing arguments are really the absence of a named style guide. Common choices: Chicago for general business prose, APA for research and social-science reporting, the GPO Style Manual for U.S. government documents, and a house style guide for everything the big guides leave open (product names, units, capitalization of your own titles). The winning move isn't the "right" guide — it's writing the choice down. (Building a house guide is a template problem too; see templates in Word.)

The pass that fixes the most

Read the document once only for topic sentences: first sentence of every paragraph, in order. If that skeleton tells the story, the document works. If it doesn't, no amount of comma-polishing will save it — reorganize first. This is the cheapest structural edit there is, and you can do it to your own draft.