Writing style can be viewed as a spectrum, with material such as legislation at one end and teen-text at the other.
It’s important to recognize the wide variation in styles and to be able to choose and use the correct one. Written communication is not as effective as face-to-face because body language and tone of voice are absent, and using the wrong style will send the wrong message to your audience. Write casually in a business document and you risk you and your document being regarded as unprofessional. Write formally in a community newsletter and your neighbours may think you unfriendly, remote or stuck-up.
This article looks at both those extremes as well as some of the more easily-identified intermediate ones.
Legal
Laws, bylaws, statutes, international treaties, contracts, and similar documents are not written with the common mortal in mind. They are written by lawyers for lawyers. I read that the legal writing style abhors the comma, and judging from the sentence length of the average legal document, I’d guess that the period gets the same cold shoulder treatment. It’s as if lawyers have no need to draw breath while reading their materials (or perhaps they master circular breathing as part of their training).
Many words have specific meanings in law—for example, words relating to the ownership of goods and land. A good dictionary will show the legal definitions of some of these words; a legal dictionary would need to be consulted for most.
Legal English is easily spotted. Long sentences with few if any pauses; quasi-tautological terms (null and void, terms and conditions, let or hindrance), unfamiliar word order, foreign-language terms, phrases such as “the aforementioned” followed by a redundant restatement of the aforementioned person, place or thing: these and many other tell-tale features typify Legal English or its evil twin Legalese. (By the way, “legalese” is a pejorative—use it to annoy lawyers!)
There are many articles on the wonderweb that describe the features of legal English in more detail than this article has space (or inclination) for. Lots of those articles also explain justify and rationalize the retention of the aforementioned quasi-tautological terms lack of punctuation and other distinguishing features. If you are interested in a career writing Legal English documents please consult those as a means of gaining an initial understanding of the concepts before applying to one of the centres for learning that offer educational courses leading to qualifications in the field of legal writing.
Teen Text
Tuff to rite this one LOL cant write like teen bc Im oldenuf 2b 4 teenagers LMFAO ezier 2 rite legal english
Teen text really does not need to obey the rules and conventions of spelling, punctuation, grammar, capitalization, political correctness, or pan-generational comprehension. I’m sure any teens reading my opening sentence would ROFL at my pathetic attempt to emulate the lingua franca of their generation. I’m equally sure that most teens would not be capable of writing a user guide that would help adults text like a teen.
The preceding sad-but-true pair of statements helps to illustrate an important point (albeit in a trivial way)—that writing high quality documentation needs to be a collaborative effort involving the subject matter experts and one or more professional writers. A programmer who knows the ins and outs of AJAX, C#, recursion and SQL isn’t necessarily capable of writing high quality user documentation for the business application that he or she has developed.
It would be unwise to legislate in teen text; likewise, a car rental agreement in teen text would not meet the requirements of the aforementioned agreement LOL.
Formal Fraseology
Documents written in a formal style would, for a kickoff, not contain such a tacky spelling in their headings. Nor would they use terms such as “for a kickoff”. Formal documents are used when a professional or businesslike impression needs to be conveyed.
The following are some dos and don’ts that will help explain the characteristics of formal writing. The lists are not exhaustive, and as you can see, writing in a formal style is more about “don’t” than “do”—the underlying assumption being, of course, that the writer knows the rules for writing in general.
DO
- Write succinctly without losing meaning.
- Include an executive summary in multi-page documents, especially for those whose readership includes busy decision makers.
- Write what you mean to say. Your readership will expect you to allow them to read without having to make inferences. This rules out sarcasm, irony and other devices mentioned in the “do not” list below.
DO NOT
- Write in the first person.
- Use “big” words solely to impress. By all means use a “big” word if the intended audience is familiar with it or if its use will avoid a much longer phrase or the overuse of words placed in quotation marks to indicate their non-standard or idiomatic use.
- Use contractions routinely.
- Use colloquial terms or terminology. “Stick the thumb drive in the slot” is colloquial. “Insert the thumb drive into an available compatible USB port” is not.
- Attempt to be humorous, ironic, sarcastic or in any other way amusing.
- Sprinkle your writing with exclamation marks or other sensational markers.
- Write in essay form.
- Create a bulleted list of things to avoid without using “avoidance” terminology at the beginning of each point, because by now, you will have forgotten that this is a list of “do nots”.
Needless to say there are many other features of good formal writing, but most of them apply equally to most other styles.
Like most rules and guidelines, exceptions abound. For example, Westjet uses an informal style in some of its literature to appear “chummy”, despite being a business that wants and needs to be regarded as professional and trustworthy. The informality that they employ is (I fervently hope!) carefully measured to strike a balance between winning a customer’s friendship and losing their trust.
Informal and Semi-formal (aka Casual)
An informal or semi-formal style is appropriate in many situations. Marketing material from just about any kind of business (except perhaps undertakers or small pet animal taxidermists) would not be judged negatively for using colloquialisms, contractions or even humour.
Analogies, metaphors, cultural references and even memes may be used judiciously in material written in a style somewhere on the informal/semi-formal scale.
Most importantly, documentation that is intended to be informal shouldn’t contain formal or legal phraseology (except for effect!) Informal writing needs to sound almost conversational.
Although this article is intended to inform and educate, I’ve used an informal style to make it less intimidating and to make the attempts at humour seem less out of place. Call me the Westjet of technical writing websites; see if I care!
Colloquial; In Vogue
This is where you can let your inner teen loose (if you dare!), use the latest phrases, refer directly or indirectly to the latest memes and show just how uptight, out of sight and in the groove you are. (That last phrase would only make sense to 60-plus-year-old hippies!)
Exclamation marks, text-message-inspired initialisms and other abbreviations would be de rigueur for written material written in the colloquial or in-vogue styles. Using foreign-language terms such as de rigueur, however, would not be cool.
This style would be appropriate in marketing material aimed at the fashion-and-fad section of society, where “street cred” (another out-of-date phrase, I’m sure) is important.
The Long and Short
My personal abilities vary across the writing styles spectrum. I’m much more comfortable writing in the middle of the spectrum than I am at either end; my formal writing can border on Legalese if required, but my casual writing doesn’t get all that close to using in vogue phrases and terms authentically. My natural style is informal, with entertaining thoughts mixed in with informational ones. Irreverence is always warming up on the sidelines, and there’s always the risk that I will go off topic and dive into nested layers of related but irrelevant material. Fortunately, I know my own shortcomings and am able to avoid them when producing business documentation—my creative writing is my safety valve for irreverence and sidetracking.
I have no doubt that many lawyers are capable of using texting language, but I suspect that teenagers would spot the dialectic differences quicker than they could think up an abbreviation for “jurisprudence”.
Choice of style is usually dictated by situation and circumstances, but if it isn’t, always seek advice. Better yet, seek professional help (from a writer—I wasn’t speaking euphemistically there!)
Please Help Improve Yonder Pedant’s Ramblings
- Did I miss a typo? (I’ll feel bad when you tell me, but I’d rather you did tell me!)
- Did I write something that makes you want to turn green and burst out of your shirt?
- Do you have any better examples that you would share and allow me to use?
If so, please let me know by leaving a comment.