Recently,
the Editor's Blog
has been putting up a series of posts on "Nothing Words"; so far, her
hit list includes "Thing", "People", "Some-", and
"It". Because clarity and precision (and perhaps more importantly,
the feeling of clarity and precision) are so important to our success in
technical sales writing, I was inspired to write my own article slanted towards
our profession rather than fictional prose, but I am only extending Ms. Hill’s
excellent work.
Nothing Words (Thing, People, Something/Somehow, It) are acceptable in a draft and in speech, but they are imprecise. As an example, “Our people are skilled in providing cyber security services.” What kind of people are they? Technicians? Engineers? Do you know who you are going to staff to provide those services? Do you have a solution, or are you just guessing?
Proposal reviewers are an extremely critical audience working under tight time constraints. Nothing Words tell them that you cannot be specific – regardless of whether or not that is true – and immediately work to discredit you. The ideal of proposal prose is to be crisp and precise.
Unfortunately, proposal specialists rarely operate in an ideal environment, or have the time and resources to produce an ideal product. What if you really can’t be specific? What if you got this yesterday and it’s due tomorrow, and you still haven’t heard the solution? A lot of things are wrong with this scenario, but sticking to the scope of this article you need to be more vigilant than ever not to indulge in Nothing Words; if you can’t be precise, it is extremely important to seem precise, because that pretense is all you have. There won’t be supporting details later in the document to save you.
At best, Nothing Words are a waste of space. If the supporting details are present elsewhere in the document then the message is not lost, only diluted. The Nothing Words are a waste of precious space, but because the information is all present this case is easy to fix in editing. When supporting data is not present, then the Nothing Words become a real problem. In addition to the above case, it can occur due to very tight page constraints, when you lack room to include your usual solution or graphics. The less space you have, the more carefully you have to use it. One of the great paradoxes of proposal writing is that short documents can take much longer to write than long ones. Writing foibles such as Nothing Words weaken a long document, but destroy a short one.
So find them. Eliminate them. As Ms. Hill discusses, uncertainty can be a powerful tool in fiction. It has no place in proposal writing.
http://theeditorsblog.net/2014/09/29/nothing-words-somehow/
http://theeditorsblog.net/2014/09/08/nothing-words-thing/
http://theeditorsblog.net/2014/09/11/nothing-words-people/
