When reading instructions, users are looking for clear answers.
▪Don’t be vague. ▪Don’t be ambiguous. You know the product that you’re describing—readers don’t. What’s clear to you may not be clear at all to your audience. Also, bear in mind that most readers don’t read manuals from start to finish, so they only see a small part of the whole.
Unclear or ambiguous text has a serious impact on the perceived quality of your document:
▪If readers do notice that a phrase is unclear or ambiguous, this results in uncertainty. Ambiguous texts don’t inspire confidence. ▪If readers don’t notice that a phrase is unclear or ambiguous (which often happens), this may result in misunderstanding and failure. ▪If an unclear or ambiguous phrase goes unnoticed by translators, translated versions of your document may be plain wrong. In this case, all readers who read the translated version get the wrong information. The key rule on how to be specific is to avoid all sorts of vague terms.
Note:
Being specific is more important than being concise (see Be concise). Don’t write ambiguous sentences because you want to make them as short as possible. If necessary, don’t hesitate to repeat a word, or add a syntactic cue (see Feel free to repeat a word and Add syntactic cues).
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