Hyderabad Technical WriterA blog for Technical Writing Tips and Tricks, Quick Reference Guides, Technology, Hyderabad, and India
20 Rookie Formal Writing Mistakes
1. Avoid the use of passive tense. For example, “The dog bit the boy” reads better and shorter instead of “The boy was bitten by the dog”.
2. Numbers ten or less are spelled out: “It consists of two fields”, not “2 fields”.
3. Use “until” instead of “till”.
4. Avoid in-line enumeration like: “Packets can be (a) lost, (b) stolen, (c) get corrupted.” The enumeration only interrupts the flow of thought.
5. Use normal capitalisation in captions (“This is a caption”, not “This is a Caption”).
6. Don’t start sentences with “That’s because” or “And”.
7. In formal writing, avoid contractions like “don’t, doesn’t, won’t, it’s”.
8. Be careful not to confuse “its” with “it’s”.
9. Don’t use slash-constructs such as “man/woman”. Such expressions should be expanded into “man or woman” or “man and woman”, depending on the intended meaning.
10. Don’t use symbols like “+” (for and), “->” (for follows or implies), or “%” (for percentage), outside of equations.
11. If you say, “for example” or “like”, do not follow this with “etc.”. The “like” and “for example” already indicate that there are more such items.
12. Avoid bulleted lists of one-sentence paragraphs. They make your paper look like a slide presentation and interfere with smooth reading.
13. Remember that “i.e.” and “e.g.” are always followed by a comma. Moreover, avoid excessive use of “i.e.”. Vary your expression: “such as”, “this means that”, “because”.
14. Do not use ampersands (&) or slash-abbreviations (such as s/w or h/w) in formal writing.
15. “respectively” is preceded by a comma, as in “The light bulbs lasted 10 and 100 days, respectively.”
16. “Therefore” and “thus” are usually followed by a comma, as in “Therefore, one cannot…………”
17. Use “in Figure 1″ instead of “following figure” since figures may get moved during the publication or typesetting process.
18. Text columns in tables are left aligned; numeric columns are aligned on the decimal or right aligned.
19. Do not use GIF images for figures, as GIFs produce awful print quality.
20. Do not refer to colours in graphs since most people will print it on a monochrome printer. Make sure that graph lines are easily distinguishable when printing on a monochrome printer.
