Friday, August 06, 2010

Phrases to Avoid

A tweet sent me to a web site that lists phrases to avoid in technical writing. Personally, I find their list to be pretty mild. Things like:

a majority of -- most

a sufficient amount of -- enough

according to our data -- we find

I'd like to add MY list of phrases that should not show up in your documentation:

  • Hey, dick head, ...
  • After you put out the fire...
  • Your browser is as lame as you are.
  • If you figure out what this feature does, let our tech writers know.
  • Some side effects might include...
  • In our defense...

4 comments:

Unknown said...

Must be Friday. ;-)

Here's another one, based on an error message that a colleague recently saw: "Correct whatever you might have done to cause the error, and retry."

Your buddy Warren said...

May I contribute to the No-Nos?

If this documentation is not perfectly clear, please feel free to contact us after you pull your head from your...

MaryHS said...

And then there's always the dialog box I used to get in FM7....the one that contained no words. Just a button.

:0

Monique Maritz said...

Fantastic!

Almost like one error message I recently saw:

"Error 405. Please resolve this error to continue."

Hhhmmmm...