Comments on: Understanding Passion Fluff http://www.stc-techedit.org/2007/04/11/understanding-passion-fluff/ Sun, 06 Jul 2008 21:03:41 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.2 By: Justin Baker http://www.stc-techedit.org/2007/04/11/understanding-passion-fluff/#comment-160 Justin Baker Fri, 13 Apr 2007 15:28:20 +0000 http://www.stc-techedit.org/2007/04/11/understanding-passion-fluff/#comment-160 I completely support this perspective, and I feel that, as editors, it is one of our primary responsibilities to prune unnecessary words and bloated sentence structures. There is a great Asian perspective that a garden is complete once there is nothing left to take out. I believe in this minimalist aesthetic. Less is more. I agree that people do not want to read either at work or at home. Life is complex, and its various activities are time-consuming; it is only natural that we seek the path of least resistance. This is not laziness; this is logical. I am a technical writer and technical editor, and even I do not read the manuals for a consumer product, for example, unless I can not figure it out for myself. (Not to mention that many of them are so poorly written or, I suspect, poorly translated that they are not worth reading.) People read technical material because they have to, not because they want to. This doesn't mean that we shouldn't seek to provide the most concise text possible because people still do use technical manuals. (I'm reading one now to figure out my new camera.) Even more to the point, when someone references a technical text, he or she is probably in a state of frustration with little time, so the last thing the user wants to do is read through a lot of dense text that over-complicates the matter being focused on. Less is more. I completely support this perspective, and I feel that, as editors, it is one of our primary responsibilities to prune unnecessary words and bloated sentence structures. There is a great Asian perspective that a garden is complete once there is nothing left to take out. I believe in this minimalist aesthetic. Less is more.

I agree that people do not want to read either at work or at home. Life is complex, and its various activities are time-consuming; it is only natural that we seek the path of least resistance. This is not laziness; this is logical. I am a technical writer and technical editor, and even I do not read the manuals for a consumer product, for example, unless I can not figure it out for myself. (Not to mention that many of them are so poorly written or, I suspect, poorly translated that they are not worth reading.)

People read technical material because they have to, not because they want to. This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t seek to provide the most concise text possible because people still do use technical manuals. (I’m reading one now to figure out my new camera.) Even more to the point, when someone references a technical text, he or she is probably in a state of frustration with little time, so the last thing the user wants to do is read through a lot of dense text that over-complicates the matter being focused on.

Less is more.

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