Computer Journalism: Impenetrable technowaffle
At this time of year in my day job, I have to supervise exams.
Today, while making sure with one eye that my students weren’t cheating in their Greek exam, with the other eye I read Writing Good English by Tony Kleu, a subeditor at the Sydney Morning Herald.
A section in the chapter on jargon and waffle deserves a wider audience:
Jargon is sometimes unfairly dismissed as bad English…. What is bad is the inappropriate use of jargon in speech or text directed at a non-specialist audience…. Newspapers and magazines are full of it, sadly, especially in their computer pages.
Writers familiar with the jargon of the computer industry regularly fail to translate it into standard English for their readers. Instead of explaining, they parrot words they saw in an industry press release, leaving the poor readers to make sense of impenetrable techowaffle.
A typical recent example was the phrase “form factor”, meaning size. That phrase doesn’t save any space. It actually requires yet another word, an adjective, before it acquires any value:
This computer offers blinding speed and generous memory in a compact form factor.
The writer meant
This small computer is very fast and has a big memory.
It gets worse:
The HP Compaq nc4200 notebook PC simplifies the on-the-go mobile professional experience by packing mainstream computing features into an ultra-thin lightweight form factor.
Setting aside the question of what a mobile professional experience is (a doctor doing house calls, maybe?) the writer meant it was small and light. But isn’t that something that we already expect in a notebook PC? The writer might as well have said:
The HP Compaq nc4200 notebook PC has all the features you’d expect from a powerful desktop computer.
Sometimes, it seems as if the writer is deliberately showing off, as if to tell his audience 
“You’re thick; you don’t even know what this means.”
Perhaps I notice this more than I should, being a writer who is interested in geek things rather than a geek who likes to write. In any case, this hits the nail on the head, I reckon.
Tags: computer writing, form factor, IT, jargon, journalism, not apple mail, plain EnglishRelated posts
June 13th, 2006 at 11:29 pm
I definitely agree with the thrust of your post, but I’m not sure your examples are apt. For instance, in the first example, what the writer meant was “this small computer is very fast, has a big memory, and isn’t too big,” not just “this small computer is very fast and has a big memory.” Similarly, in the second example, it’s neither accurate nor realistic to assume all laptops are expected to be small and light. The majority of laptops–particularly those sold to the corporate market en masse–are neither. When discussing laptops, size and weight (aka. form factor) is an important issue that’s not inherently redundant. Whether “form factor” qualifies as jargon really depends on the audience.
Where jargon is most irritating to me is as a lazy way of avoiding the effort necessary to communicate clearly or explain something properly, couched in a form of intellectual pseudo-elitism. The message is “if you were smarter, you’d understand what I’m saying” when more often than not the reality is “I can’t communicate worth a damn” or, worse, “if you understood what I’m saying you’d probably realize it isn’t that profound after all.”
June 14th, 2006 at 2:45 am
“The writer meant
This small computer is very fast and has a big memory.”
I don’t think so. Form Factor refers to physical size, so “generous memory in a compact form factor” would more accurately mean “lots of memory, fits in a small space” - differentiating it from having a good amount of memory but requiring a shoe box to carry it.
June 14th, 2006 at 4:53 pm
A Rant about a Rant about Jargon…
Hawk Wings, a blog about mail.app, which is usually pretty good (I probably wouldn’t read a mediocre blog about an entry-level application bundled with my OS), has reprinted (in what is probably a sterling example of so-called “gray”…