While this was written in a tone of a senior technical writer talking to junior technical writers, everything written below can also apply to all types of professional writing and business communication.
Technical writing isn't sexy but it is a necessary job. I've been one for over 15 years now and cannot stress how often people will think they know how professional writing or business communication is supposed to work, only to forward misspelled emails or poorly formatted deliverables. Hence, this is where the tech writers come in - we act as the electricians, plumbers, and carpenters of the writing world. No one writes important novels or intriguing exposés about us. We just go about our work, making sure the rest of you don't accidently set off large-scale disasters due to a typo.
Excerpt of a page from Villanova, Rudimenta Grammaticæ, around 1500 (found here)
Of course, due to the lack of sexiness, technical writing can also be incredibly frustrating since it requires (a) paying close attention to everything you do - like being a style and grammar auditor - and (b) having your co-workers presume you're mostly there to take their notes during meetings. When you're in your 20s, this can be a real turn-off as a junior tech writer. When starting off, it’s easy to get overwhelmed with all of the new terms, technology, corporate personnel, and template structures you encounter when working on any given document load. That’s not also considering all of the nuances that go into each culture you become a part of throughout your careers, since each company or agency has its own quirks to how they present their documentation.
While not much can be done about co-worker ignorance, there's a trick you can use that helps make the process go a lot smoother that I learned from one of the very first senior tech writers I ever worked with: "turn on the music".
So, what does that mean: turn on the music? It usually refers to using the “Show/Hide ¶” function found in the Home tab of a Word document [1]. I also refer to it as “playing the pilcrows,” since that feels more accurate whenever I actually edit a document. Knowing this has helped me out of many pinches and I make sure to always have that pilcrow turned on whenever I do anything with Word.
If you’ve never (or rarely) come across them before, the pilcrow (¶) or “paragraph mark” is traditionally used while editing a document to indicate where a break in paragraphs should exist. You usually first encounter them during middle school/high school English but don’t really get to know them well until you take a journalism course at some point, where they used to be commonly used when proof-reading copy. To be even nerdier – and to quote Wikipedia – the pilcrow was used by medieval writers “to mark a new train of thought, before the convention of visually discrete paragraphs was commonplace” or to mark a new sentence altogether [2].
How exactly does playing the pilcrows work when editing documents, though? There’s several things that you can do with it but for the purposes of this being a primer, I’ll highlight the most important ones. First, there’s the most obvious in that is shows you where all of the paragraphs are actually hiding. When you have a document open but the “Show/Hide ¶” function is off, you can tell where the paragraphs might be located, based on what you learned during elementary school. What you need to realize, though, is that what we generally think of as paragraphs are actually presented as hard returns [3] when using a word processor. Whenever you hit Enter, you get a hard return and thus an official “paragraph.” Otherwise, if you either intentionally or accidentally hit Enter while also pressing the Shift key, you end up with a soft return [4] instead and then proceed to throw everything to hell with the formatting styles if you're unlucky.
Example of hard vs. soft returns (credit to me, who is not a graphic designer)
The next thing that’s helpful about having this function on is that you can find out how your words and sentences are spaced out. While everyone’s got their own opinions on whether to single- or double-space, [5] that matters less than making sure there’s consistency throughout the document in question. Turning the “music” on helps you see where the inconsistencies are for the spacing and allows for running a Replace All for the spaces. This is easy to do if you need it:
Either press Ctrl+H or press “Replace” in the Home tab to open the Replace window.
In the “Find what:” field, hit the Space bar once or twice to type however many spaces you don’t want in your document (in my case, it would be two Spaces).
In the “Replace with:” field, do the same thing but for however many spaces you want to keep in the document (for me, one Space).
Hit “Replace All” and voila!
Having all of your spaces be consistent won’t hide the graver sins your document might have (spelling errors, jumbled grammar, etc.) but at least it’ll be prettier. Tab markers and object anchors are other hidden characters [6] shown while playing the pilcrows, which are both less common to deal with while reviewing technical documents but can still be a pain in the ass if you’re not diligent enough in catching them. Tab markers show where indents occur with the text and can throw off your bullets/numbering if you’re not careful, so they’re helpful to note if you’re getting the wrong results with your outline list. Object markers are mostly crucial when dealing with images and charts, especially when placing within the body of your text and you need to trace a caption back to your Table of Figures.
Example of object anchor (1) and tab marker (2) (credit goes to me again)
As mentioned earlier, this was a lesson learned early enough to come in handy everywhere I’ve been all these years. When you're stuck trying to solve a formatting problem or if the document looks wonkier in one place versus every other paragraph, playing the pilcrows can help pinpoint where things went wrong and how best to fix them. While it makes the page look graphically busy, once you’ve played the pilcrows enough, you get use to them and they begin to work in your best interest.
Whether you’re brand new to tech writing or have been doing it for a while (or even if you just work with documents for a living), make friends with those pilcrows – you’ll appreciate how much they help you in the end.
End Notes
[1] I work exclusively in Word and use it as my default example but the concept talked about in this post applies to any word processor that has a similar “show formatting” function.
[2] There’s a lot of history behind this symbol that goes way beyond what I want to talk about – if you’re interested in learning more, check out this write-up from Grammarist or the book Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks by Keith Houston (which Slate excerpted in 2013 here and here).
[3] According to Xlibris, a hard return is referred to as such “because it simulates a ‘carriage return’ action used on typewriters to start a new line of text.” Having never actually used a typewriter (born in the late 1980s here), I can only imagine this refers to that pushing motion to realign the paper in the typewriter that’s dramatically shown in old movies. [4] Soft returns are meant only to create a new line and don’t really act as paragraph markers. This can be helpful when dealing with lists but I’ve not generally found them to be useful for Word documents. In Excel, on the other hand, they can be a lifesaver when adding a lot of information into a specific cell.
[5] I used to double-space but decided about 10 years ago that single-spacing just looked cleaner. I’ll brook no arguments on this.
[6] There are some other hidden characters shown when the function is on in Word, specifically hidden text and optional hyphens but I usually don’t see or deal with those when working with technical documents.