Bad strings

The ability to pile up qualifiers in front of a noun is a powerful feature of English and one of its worst weaknesses. We tend to overuse it in general English, and even more in technical English.

Think of the noun “artifact.” Where I work, we frequently add a couple of qualifiers to it, such as “Project Tracker” and “defect.” Because the rules of English grammar allow us to save words by putting those qualifiers in front of the noun, we frequently do, and we get “Project Tracker defect artifact.” Add some adjectives such as “new,” or “recently modified,” and before you know it you can have a compound noun phrase that takes up two or more lines of text on your screen or page. In your mind as the writer it makes perfect sense and keeps your word count down, and it is grammatically correct, but the first-time reader finds his/her progress arrested by the need to stop and work his/her way backwards through the compound phrase to unpack its meaning.

One rule of thumb is to watch for compound noun phrases that exceed three words, and think of ways to break them up by restructuring the sentences they occur in. For example, if I wrote “This is an overly complex compound noun phrase” (five words), in the second draft I might change that to “This compound noun phrase is too complex.” (Three words.) Or better, “This phrase is too complex. It has too many nouns in a row.” (More words in total, but quicker to read — a good tradeoff.)

This is one reason why we almost never use possessives in technical communication, such as “Project Tracker’s reporting feature.” They almost always lead to excessive compounding, which might be fine in ordinary English, but not in a medium where we have to strive for total transparency.