I hate the term ‘platform’ in technology writing. The word is often used in a vague hand-waving way to refer to a piece of hardware or software, or even a combination of the two.

Like ‘thing’ the word comes in useful when the writer doesn’t want to be precise.

Platform is also used as padding to make whatever is being discussed sound more important. For example, there are people who think “the Windows platform” somehow trumps “the Windows operating system” or even plain old “Windows”.

Likewise “the Intel platform”, or any other bloody platform.

Environment too

The same can be said about ‘environment‘. To me an environment is a pond with frogs hopping around. A rain forest is an environment.

To describe an operating system as an environment is pompous, wordy and just poor communications.

I can accept Windows being described as ’software’, it’s accurate, if not precise. We can shorten operating system to OS when communicating with more tech-savvy readers.

There are people who think Apple’s tightly-knit combination of software and hardware qualifies as a platform or an environment (though frequently people who use one term will use both to mean exactly the same thing). It’s not. Software plus hardware adds up to a computer.

If you want to talk about what goes on in the world of Apple computers, say so, be precise, be accurate, call it an Apple computer.

Good writing is clear, concise and unambiguous. “Platform” and “environment” fail on all three counts.

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It is almost always better to use the verb said when you are reporting someone’s words.

Newspaper and other journalist’s style guides disagree over whether to use the past tense (said) or present tense (says). It doesn’t matter which one choose, just stick with one and, for the most part, make sure you use the same tense throughout. There are times when you may need to write someone says this now, but said something different in the past.

While you can legitimately use said even with written words -  if you are quoting what someone wrote in an email or in a Twitter tweet – it is better to make it clear the person wasn’t talking at the time.

The alternatives to said are often pompous or value-laden. I once worked with a fellow journalist who sprinkled his copy with words like averred or commented. Neither word adds any useful information and may frighten off some readers.

It’s possible readers will interpret other alternatives as suggesting the speaker is lying or misinformed. Think of claimed or according to.

One alternative I allow myself is the verb ask, but only when someone is clearly asking a question.

Fiction writer Elemore Leonard has another perspective on this. In his excellent Ten rules of writing he says:

Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue.

The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But said is far less intrusive than grumbled, gasped, cautioned, lied. I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with “she asseverated,” and had to stop reading to get the dictionary.

Leonard writes fast-paced fiction with terrific dialogue, if sticking with ’said’ is good enough for him, it’s  good enough for the rest of us.

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Apart from being ugly the and/or construction is often used ambiguously. It can make your meaning unclear. This is something good writers strive to avoid.

The term is often used when the writer or speaker, means either and or or, but not both. In this case it is preferable to just use the one you mean.

If you do mean “either and or or or both” then it’s best to spell out your meaning in full, ie:

You can eat an apple or an orange, or both.

And/or crept into common use from the legal world, where it is often used as a catch-all, but is still often considered controversial as the meaning is imprecise.

The same applies to using a slash between words. It means or, so don’t be lazy and leave your readers to guess your meaning. Be precise, use the word. It’s only two letters.

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I’m a journalist. I’ve been one for 30 years. When I started it was a world of manual typewriters and hot metal print. Long before typing was mainstream I could touch type at secretary-like speeds. I’ve spent most of the last 20 years tapping away at a word processor.

So I know a thing or two about the subject. For the last decade or so I’ve used Microsoft Word. Before it either MacWord or WordPerfect. That’s not WordPerfect on Windows – we’re talking about WordPerfect 5.1 – an MS-Dos application.

From my point of view as a professional word processor user, WordPerfect 5.1 represented the high water mark in PC word processing. I’d still use it today if it were a practical option.

In fact, I’d probably use a manual typewriter if I could hook it up to the net. No. Scrub that. Manual typewriters are hopeless when it comes to edits and rewrites.

Microsoft Word is the industry standard. Every editor I’ve dealt with in the past 10 years requires journalists to file copy in Word format. Or at least they did until recently.

Word has its advantages, but from my point of view, it simply never was as good as WordPerfect 5.1 and isn’t likely to be so in the future. It’s bloated. Not just in terms of the weight of resources required to run Word, but in terms of features.

I really don’t need fancy layout, outlining and many, many other tools. In fact I don’t need 90 percent of the features in Word. Most of them are distractions from the task at hand – which is converting ideas into words.

And using a mouse is a pain in the bum. Or, more accurately, a pain in the carpel tunnel.

Distraction free word processor

WordPerfect 5.1 did everything I wanted, well, perfectly. It was distraction free. That’s something Word isn’t, but a number of modern applications aim for. I’ve written about them before. WordPerfect 5.1 is the closest computers ever came to reproducing the good aspects of typewriters without chucking in the kitchen sink.

It had all the features I needed and they were all just a keystroke away. My fingers could find every command without engaging the brain. While this keyboard control is technically true of Word – the complexity overwhelms me and I often find myself reaching for the mouse.

The fact someone even thought of adding a talking paper clip is a sign there’s some badly screwed thinking behind Word. The truth is, Word is a word processor designed for people who are not professional writers by people who are not professional writers.

In a perfect world, someone would take WordPerfect 5.1 and turn it into a software-as-a-service application. It’s about the only Saas application I would happily pay money for.

On a good day Google Docs gets close to the WordPerfect 5.1 ideal. I can hit Ctrl-Shift-F for full screen mode then hit F11 to get rid of Firefox’s browser distractions. This is almost like typing on a clean sheet of paper.

Google Docs has been around for some time, but recently it has matured to the point where it is now a serious alternative to applications like Microsoft Word. I’m not sure when this happened. It snuck up on me. A year ago the program wasn’t up to scratch. Today it is.

Google Docs’ weak points

One niggle is the lack of a zoom facility. If I’m typing in Google Docs using, say, 10 point Verdana, the onscreen text appears small. After 30 years as a journalist my eyes find that hard going. I can change the font size or even use Firefox’s zoom feature, but a quick, single key zoom-unzoom command would be better.

The only other shortcoming in the software is the lack of a British English option in the spell checker. I’m a professional writer, so I don’t use a spell checker while I’m writing, but it’s a handy tool later when I’m proofing my copy. It’s irritating to be told my spellings are incorrect when they are fine.

There is an elephant in the room. Google Docs is an online application. It’s only useful when I’m connected to the Internet – which isn’t 100 percent of the time. In theory Google Gears works around this roadblock, but in practice I’ve found it difficult to use the Firefox or Internet Explorer browsers when there’s no connection – maybe the experience is better with Google’s own Chrome browser, I haven’t tested it yet.

Google Docs has one clear advantage over WordPerfect – you can share documents. This is not just a piece of bloated feature inflation. It’s useful, elegant and to use a software industry cliche; powerful.

Word has a whole raft of features for tracking changes and commenting on documents. I’m sure some people find them useful. I’ve only ever used them once – in a job where the client insisted on marking changes this way. And as a journalist I’ve occasionally been amazed at the information left by people who don’t know how to use Word’s collaboration features properly.

Conclusion: Google Docs

When I set out to write this piece my original thoughts were Google Docs is useful but it doesn’t cut the mustard for a journalist’s writing needs. By going through the points logically for this story I’ve changed my opinion. Google Docs appears to do everything I need and, for now at least, seems to be a worthy successor to WordPerfect 5.1.

As an experiment I’m going to stop using all other writing tools for a few weeks to test this theory to breaking point. At some point I’ll report back on the experience.

Updated: September 5

It’s only 48 hours into the experiment and I’m throwing in the towel and returning to Microsoft Word. Soon I’ll write a fresh post explaining why Google Docs doesn’t work for me.

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Words formed from a series of initial letters or parts of other words are known as acronyms.

For example:

IBM, BBC, Unesco, WHO, Anzac, laser, radar

Acronyms are useful because they often make text simpler, easier to read and understand. There’s no question life would be harder if you had to write light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation every time you needed to refer to a laser.

It’s best to spell an acronym out in full the first time you use it unless you are writing for a specialist audience and the term is instantly familiar. I prefer to write the full term, followed by the acronym thus:

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco).

Others like to write the acronym, followed by its full title in brackets. Both are equally correct, it’s simply a matter of editorial style.

If an acronym is confusing, don’t use it.

Some style guides allow acronyms written with full stops (or periods) between each letter or segment. I disagree.

Likewise, there are those who think acronyms should always be written in capital letters. Again I disagree. In both cases the result is both inelegant and distracting.

You’ll notice in the examples above, I’ve written some acronyms in capitals, some with an initial capital and some in lower case. My logic for this is as follows:

• When you pronounce the acronym as a string of letters, ie eye, bee, emm for IBM the computer company, write the word in capitals. Some people call this type of acronym initialism.
• If the acronym is a word and spoken as a word, then treat it as a normal word with an initial capital if it is a proper noun otherwise with a lower case initial letter.
• Some American newspapers automatically use an initial capital followed by lower case if the acronym had more than six letters.

One difficulty is deciding whether to use a or an before an acronym. The important thing is how it sounds when spoken.

Certain acronyms were deliberately designed from the outset as pronounceable words. For example, Action on Smoking and Health (Ash).

Lastly, there’s a very good piece of advice in The Economist Style Guide:

…try not to repeat the abbreviation too often; so write the agency and not the IAEA, the Union rather than the EU, to avoid splattering the page with capital letters. There is no need to give the initials of an organisation if it is not referred to again.

Related articles:

• Companies are singular
• The inverted pyramid
• Keep it simple
• And
• Go easy on the adjectives
• Capital letters

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You may have been taught at school that you shouldn’t use a preposition to end a sentence. This is a hangover from Latin and Greek – sentences in the two languages never ended with prepositions.

Years ago I worked in the public relations department of Britain’s Science and Engineering Research Council and was taken to task by my boss for ending a sentence with a preposition. He told me it was; “Something, up with which, I will not put” – a quote from Winston Churchill.*

But that was then, and this is now. The grammar police won’t agree with me, but I’d argue this is a rule you can comfortably ignore for everyday writing, business writing, journalism and all types of online communications.

In practical everyday writing there will be many cases when it simply doesn’t make sense to contort your sentences to avoid ending with a proposition. Your writing will be clearer and easier to understand.

And you’ll be in great company. Most newspaper style guides allow it, most popular authors and the overwhelming majority of modern literary authors simply sidestep the rule.

*Churchill was on my side in this. I suspect my boss didn’t realise the quote was said as a joke.

Further reading:
Better writing: Rhythm
Better writing: Companies are singular
Better writing: The inverted pyramid
Better writing: Keep it simple
Better writing: And
Better writing: Go easy on the adjectives
Better writing: Capital letters

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Here’s one I’m pleased I had nothing to do with.

From Mumbrella: Embarassing typo in The Australian after News Limited boss speaks about the health of the industry

See: With newspapers you’re wrong forever at Mumbrella.

Incidentally, this is why newspapers need skilled, experienced sub-editors.

There’s a lot of talk and writing online about the New Zealand government’s super city plan for Auckland.

The correct style for super city is two lower case words. The term is not a name, at least not yet. It is a description. Capitals are only used for proper names, so there shouldn’t be any confusion or question over the term.

Nor is it one word. Over the past twenty years or so there’s been something of a fashion to run words together and separate the component words with a capital letter. If a company or organisation wishes to do that with its name, or the name of a product, it has every right to do so.

But there’s no grammatical or logical reason to make a single word out of super city. Would you write Auckland is a BigCity? Of course not.

Fairfax’s Stuff.co.nz web site is confused about this. At the time of writing the newspaper company’s site has an Auckland Super City page which offers every permutation: one word, two words, upper case lower case. The New Zealand Herald is just as confused as this search shows: “supercity” Search Results. In fact it adds a hitherto unseen variation: Supercity, all one word with a single capital.

For clarification and background you may like to read my previous article about capital letters.