Which vs. That

You know, every so often, you stretch your limits.

I recently started a new position with a security company in Utah. It’s big, it’s faceless, but I have great co-workers who I enjoy and relate to. I’m sure many of you are familiar with just this kind of environment: very good people, very positive work environment, but with the looming shadow of “corporate” possibly making decisions that seem to happen in a vacuum.

Anyway, the funny thing to me is, I learned today that you can go your whole life thinking you’re good at something, just to find out that, really, you’re not all that good at it.

See, my job involves a lot of technical writing. A whole lot. Well, basically, that’s what it is. I’m a System Administrator by trade. I interviewed for this contracting gig, and was surprised that they wanted a SysAdmin. It’s a “Security Analyst” position, and it’s all about writing down how I fix stuff.

It’s really kind of cool, in its way. I love to write, anyway (as evidenced by this blog), I’m fairly fast at it, and I do it a lot.

Anyway, I sat down for a quick editing session with my co-worker today, who has experience as an editor.

Oh. My. So much red ink.

I learned three interesting lessons:

1. When writing technical documentation, I rely on “gerunds” way too much. Gerunds are words that end with “ing”: fishing, boating, hiking. I create sentences, completely clear to me, that are opaque to readers, such as “developing auditing policies is critical for avoiding operating integrity issues”. That’s actually kind of a nonsense sentence, but it gives a sense of how I’ve been writing. Bad Matt!
2. I also learned the difference between which and that. The difference is small to most people, but in technical writing, it’s important that relative pronouns are used correctly. The paradoxical mnemonic, as mentioned in the description, is “use that to tell which, and which to tell that”.
3. Complex statements are best broken up into several shorter statements. The result will be wordier, but easier to read. I tend, often with many interrupting clauses and difficult-to-grok phrases in which I delay the verb until close to the end, to create very lengthy, complicated sentences 🙂

Yeah, OK, we already know that I am the supreme nerd god. I enjoy this kind of minutiae. Rephrasing statements is a kind of syntactic drug, searching for unique and interesting ways to say the same thing you’ve just said 20 times in a row.

As a matter of fact, we just had a discussion about that. My co-worker suggested that writing was crack cocaine, and really good writing was… well, we faltered there. We struggled with maybe using meth instead. I think we eventually ended up with “writing is like dumpster diving; good writing is like dumpster diving your next-door-neighor and finding some good meth in the bottom.”

Probably the world’s crappiest metaphor!

Anyway…

What oddities of English did you learn this week?

EDIT by matthew: Glaring grammatical errors fixed. By Grapthar’s Hammer, I will be avenged!