A New Year's Resolution for Garden Writers

**"Lorraine Ballato" l*@msn.com**

Hello and happy holidays to everyone!

I'm attaching an excerpt from an article that appeared in this past Thursday's NY Times' section on technology.  It's written by David Pogue, a noted technology writer and he discusses how he approaches writing his columns.  I think he has some good ideas that we can all adopt, so I offer it to you for your consideration.

A prosperous new year to all of you.

Lorraine

Lorraine Ballato  
16 Mudry Farm Rd  
Brookfield CT 06804  
(203)740-8636
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 From the Desk of David Pogue: On Being a Technology Writer  
=============================================================

Last week, my incoming e-mail included a surprising  
attachment: an advanced-placement English essay, by a high-
schooler named Chris Diemba, on the subject of my writing  
style. Chris had analyzed several months' worth of my  
columns, and identified a number of tricks and tics that tend  
to appear regularly.

Chris's essay got me to thinking, once again, about the  
greatest chronic challenge for a tech writer: finding the  
right technological level for the broadest possible audience.

Take my dad, for example. He always introduces me with the  
same joke: "And this is my son David. I read his column in  
the Times every week. I don't always understand it--but I  
read it!"

I always smile gamely, but inside, I wince. As you can  
probably imagine, it's not easy to strike just the right tone  
for computer scientists and technophobes alike. Actually,  
it's impossible; all you can do is aim for the mainstream.
In general, I don't sweat it when I receive protests from  
readers on the fringes. I figure they cancel each other out:  
on one hand, the novice who complained that I didn't define  
"U.S.B. connector," and, on the other, the engineer who asked  
why I don't include MTBF data (mean time between failure) of  
the cameras I review.  

If you're truly geeky or truly technophobic, you should know  
about a couple of tricks I use routinely. As Chris Diemba put  
it: "A significant amount of Pogue's exposition is found in  
the parenthesis, usually less important specifications."   
Bingo. That is, I try to put the stuff that's of interest  
primarily to geeks in parentheses.

I might write, for example, "When it comes to connectors,  
this TV is loaded (two S-video, one each DVI and HDMI, three  
sets of component inputs and a quartet of composite jacks)."  
That's a coded way of telling people like my father: "You can  
ignore everything in the parentheses; that's provided for  
people who care. My point is that there are plenty of  
connectors."  

I usually put pixel dimensions in parentheses, too, because  
plenty of readers don't know what pixels are and have no idea  
whether, say, 1024 by 768 is good or bad.  

Then there's the little matter of techno-jargon. Avoiding it,  
in my book, is a freebie: it's an effortless way to avoid  
confusing novices while taking nothing away from more  
advanced readers. You will never, ever catch me using terms  
like "price point" when I mean price, "content" when I mean  
TV shows, "RAM" when I mean memory, or "functionality" when I  
mean function.  

(Want to know how out of hand this buzzword-itis has become?  
No joke--I found this sentence in a computer magazine: "This  
laptop case is a triumph of form over functionality."  
ARRGGGHH!!! Now they're actually retrofitting cliches with  
buzzwords!)

Nonetheless, despite all of these tricks and tactics, I  
occasionally make bad assumptions. Take, for example, the  
time I wrote about SanDisk's folding SD memory card for  
digital cameras. You can take it out of your camera and  
insert it directly into your computer's U.S.B. jacks (to  
transfer photos) instead of using a cable. Dozens of readers  
wrote to ask if this card is available in Memory Stick or  
Compact Flash formats. In other words, I shouldn't have taken  
it for granted that people recognize SD as a memory-card  
format.

So there's my New Year's Resolution: to redouble my efforts  
along these lines. To make the columns easier to understand  
for novices, while adding more technological meat for the  
veterans.  

And yours should be to write your friendly neighborhood tech  
writers to let them know how well they're doing.

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