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.journalism, jargon, computer writing, IT, plain English, form factor, not apple mailSimilar Posts:

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