Before you correct what another of God’s creatures has written, it’s your responsibility to be sure you’re reacting to a real, explainable flaw and not merely to a difference from your personal style.

I can’t compare the reading of a sentence to the grubby exertion of picking up bullet casings (not most sentences, anyway) but there can be a similar disappointment when you reach the end and you need to go back over the whole thing again.

If we write that a message appears on the screen, is the word “appears” unsettlingly inappropriate, implying that a human or supernatural magician is at work?  To me, not at all.  And the 1913 Webster’s says that to appear is “to come or be in sight; to be in view; to become visible.”  Nothing eerie about that.  Yet few topics pop up more often on the technical writers’ mailing lists than how to avoid the supposedly magical-sounding “appear.” 

Just as you would define any acronym on first use, it’s best to define who “we” is - “we at Neckwear Techware Limited,” for example - and to stay true to that definition.

If you have commas serving more than one purpose in the same sentence, it’s a good idea to consider whether all the commas are necessary.

Because everything depends on the division between subject and predicate, sometimes a writer is tempted to mark that division with a comma. Particularly if the subject is long, or weighty, or followed by a pause when you speak the sentence, or if the subject is full of internal punctuation itself, or if the end of the subject isn’t obvious at a glance, the devil will offer you a comma as a tool of clarification.

If commas came in left-hand and right-hand versions, like parentheses, quotation marks, and Spanish question marks, then I think writers would be less likely to leave commas without their mates. For example, some writers - possibly fearful of comma clutter - use a comma before a year but not after it.

The important principles of technical writing are already present in the Hagaddah, the venerable promptbook for the Passover meal. We moderns have invented nothing.

The elevator door chimed open and Mumpy stepped out. Maybe she knows a good graphic artist, I thought. I needed to produce a brochure for the TiePlumb computerized necktie straightness gauge.

When I receive a document from R&D, it’s easy to tell whether Dror wrote it or Liora did. Dror is an allower, whereas Liora is an enabler.

In technical writing, one of the basic challenges of the print medium is that its nature is linear while the nature of the topic — of the product or process — may have more to do with a hierarchical or random-access structure. Often what makes repetition seem called for is the attempt to force a non-linear structure into a linear one.

There isn’t a single dictionary on http://www.onelook.com that lists “log onto” or “log into.” However, in usage “onto” and “into” are fairly strong. On Google, “you log in to” versus “you log into” is 549,000 to 488,000.

I was sent to the class next door, where I asked the neighboring teacher for “two people’s worth of plasticene.” She laughed.

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If the parenthesized remark is a less important point or an afterthought, the end of the paragraph is a fine place for it to stand out in the open, like a modest hut on the beach with the whole city of sentences on one side and the echoless edge of the island on the other.

The dictionary pretends to be a conscientious follower but, like a hundred-pound Doberman being walked on a leash, it can’t be led anywhere it doesn’t want to go. The word “seperate” has more than nineteen million hits on Google but no dictionary recognizes “seperate” as a legitimate spelling.

Colons are like piercings. Back in the day, they had their strictly prescribed positions and you seldom saw them anywhere else. Now people insert them all over the place.

When you’re intently reading pages of 10-point type, your eyes may not bother to readjust for those few words of big print. Your brain may not bother to adjust from absorbing low-level exposition to absorbing a high-level concept.

The point is to think what might happen in the future. And I’m not talking about puzzled scholars in the year 6000 wondering what kind of a tube was a YouTube. I’m talking about the customers of your product’s next version.