| I've spent much of my professional life as an editor and
teacher trying to improve prose about technical subjects. Over
the years, I've evolved into a syntactician.
Syntacticians are people (by my definition, anyway) who
use tactics borrowed from transformational grammar as practical tools
for editing
their
own and other people's writing. |
I've become convinced that technical prose is tougher to read
than it needs to be because
- it uses jargon, which in many cases is just long
sentences that
got
reduced (transformed) to strings of nouns or even strings of letters
- the people who write it don't use the transformational
resources of
English
to help their readers
|
A syntactician might be an evolved version of a technical
editor. Too
often these days, technical editors are regarded by their employers as
being useful because they can operate spellcheckers and grammar
software
(which is notoriously insensitive to the nuances of English). The
technical
editor cum syntactician is much more valuable: s/he can make
the
reader's work less onerous. (My friend and co-author Don
Bush has been making a similar case for content editing for
years in the pages of the Society for Technical Communication's Technical
Communication and Intercom.) |
| I've been formally exploring such applications for more than
a decade and
wrestling with syntax much longer. You can see an early exploration in
a presentation I
did
in 1995. |
The latest distillation
of these ideas appears on a web page that's based on a presentation I
did
in August 2005 for the editors of the Natural Resources Journal at
the University of New Mexico's School of Law.
|
The distillation mentioned at left owes much to a course I
taught periodically called "Advanced
Grammar." Students in my Technical Editing course, where I
introduced some of the concepts, often wished they'd had Advanced
Grammar first.
|
| Another presentation of the idea appeared in How
to Edit Technical Documents (also 1995), a book Don Bush and I
wrote because both of us were teaching courses on technical editing,
and none
of
the texts then available actually talked much about working with prose. |
I talk about the potential of syntactics with some
conviction. For
a decade I worked for a big consulting firm, helping clients understand
the findings of the experts they hired. Later, I earned a PhD and taught
technical communication at New Mexico Tech. |
|