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An old friend and a new old friend

U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, Arvada, Colorado, U.S.

The first 20% of the full text of this article appears below.

[Did you miss me? I had a one-fall wrestling match with cancer, and I won. So, I'm back to harass you and improve your writing.]

When I travel to give a short-course on technical writing, I use the flight as my last stage of preparation and get into the mood for teaching. I visit a valued, old friend: my dog-eared copy of George Gopen and Judith Swan's 1990 article, "The Science of Scientific Writing" (American Scientist). I've said it before: This article is superb; it sets a mental pattern for creating readable writing. Where other articles struggle with do-this and do-that's, Gopen and Swan teach by grounding good writing in how people read and understand. If you want your papers read and understood, Gopen and Swan say, take our facts and weave them into your writing style. They don't try to reduce technical writing to a paint-by-number exercise. Successful writing is not that simple. Instead, Gopen and Swan stress that successful writers know their readers. So here's the profile on readers. Readers don't like unnecessary complexity. Poor writers believe complex copy is part and parcel of a complex topic. Instead, it is an added layer weighing down a paper when the writer fails to address how readers read. My old friend shows that to . . . [Full Text of this Article]