A lot of people skip words when they speak or write. It’s okay. We all do it. But if those skipped words are the key to understanding the whole, you’ve failed at clearly communicating. Part of being an editor is pointing out when words are skipped, rendering the communication unintelligible.
I’ve been trained in 3 forms of technical writing and one of my minors was in English. I have learned how to write, and more importantly, how to
edit.
And even so, I occasionally catch
myself skipping words or steps for things that it’s imperative are communicated clearly & succinctly.
In defense of pedantry -- there's a real danger in allowing people to refer to things in certain ways.
I was just reading an apparently infamous thread where a guy was mansplaining to an author about how she shouldn’t have used the word “vulva” when the proper term was “vagina”. He was immediately fact checked by the author herself, as well as other well-educated posters…including an OB-GYN.
And then he doubled down.
Jargon and TLAs obfuscate, they don't explain.
In Prof. Stanley Johanson’s Wills & Estates class, he boiled down a 25pg document down to 2 paragraphs on a single page.
His drafting philosophy- shared with several other faculty members- was that drafting for brevity and clarity were superior because it kept people from trying to exploit loopholes. Because fewer loopholes exist when you’re not using a cornucopia of legalese to draft your docs.
A long time ago (more than a decade), I posted on a completely different forum a comment that was (IMO) pretty funny. But ... it was a joking reference that I thought was so obvious that everyone would get it. In fact, I almost ended up deleting it after writing it because I was like, "Naw ... that's just so basic and obvious, it's barely worth doing."
Circa 1988-89, I was trying to write the final paper for an advanced philosophy class and had writer’s block. So I typed up a ridiculous intro: “Millions of years ago, when philososaurs ruled the earth…”
It was a big opening paragraph, offering an overview of their prey/predator relationships, like how Nietzschesaurs hunted helpless Hegelosaurs, etc., closing with “But most fearsome of all was the terrible Kantosaurus Rex, whose razor sharp teeth…oh wait…this is a FINAL paper!”
It cracked me up and- most importantly- broke my block. The paper flowed smoothly and was finished in a few hours.
But I left the intro in place.
Dr. Luper-Foy was puzzled by my intro, and actually took off a couple of points. (A+ reduced to A.


) I didn’t challenge the downgrade, but I did show the paper to other majors and profs. Everyone else thought it was hilarious. (And ballsy.)