Cleaning Up Your Sentences

Dropping evaluative words

When I'm reading a really useful document that is supposed to seamlessly teach me how to maximize my understanding of an extreme topic, frequently occurring evaluative speech makes it exceptionally difficult for me to easily facilitate the learning of the material.

Evaluatives may seem like a good idea in your writing, but they only get in the way of conveying information. It's difficult to figure out the meaning of such sentences, let alone pick out the important details. Could you figure out the meaning in the first paragraph in this topic without rereading it? I wrote it and I still stumble through it.

Besides, as one technical writer pointed out to me, you may think it's easy to use a feature but the user might not. And that's a good point. Evaluative speech is highly subjective and while we want to encourage our readers to use the product for which we are writing, we don't want to alienate them by telling them how to think and feel. That's a job for marketing and sales, not for technical documentation. So, you should leave out all evaluative speech and just stick to the facts.

I'd rewrite the first paragraph in this topic as follows:

Evaluative speech makes it difficult for me to learn the material presented in a document.

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