6 VANQUISH VAGUENESS
Vagueness is the enemy of effective business writing and technical writing in particular. Unfortunately, it’s a very clever foe and tends to sneak in if you’re not keeping an eye out for it.
BE PRECISE
Time is particularly fertile ground for vagueness, because we’re often vague about time in normal conversation. Unfortunately, while terms such as ‘back in a tick’, ‘there in a jiffy’, ‘I’ll be with you shortly’ help to keep English colourful, they’re not much help when you’re trying to communicate something specific. Watch out for such terms creeping into your writing and replace them with actual times or periods of time: if something should take less than 10 minutes say so, because that means if it’s still churning away ...
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