Tips

On Brevity

Scan On!

Background:

Lists can save readers time by allowing them to see at a glance specific items, questions, or directions.

—Brusaw, Alred, and Oliu (1997)

In any sentence, put lists at the end. ... Put the longer item at the end of the list.

—Bush & Campbell (1995)

Original Paragraph:

A bridge connects two local area networks (LANs). The bridge physically joins separate LAN segments, such as two Ethernet cables. We offer four main types of bridges: transparent, encapsulating, translating, and source routing.

Revised Paragraph:

A bridge connects two local area networks (LANs). The bridge physically joins separate LAN segments, such as two Ethernet cables. We offer four main types of bridges:

• Transparent
• Encapsulating
• Translating
• Source routing

The TCP/IP protocol is found in major operating systems, such as Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows NT, and Novell’s NetWare, a LAN operating system. Because it appears in so many operating systems, TCP/IP has become the most common way to connect desktop PCs and workstations with each other within an organization and over the Internet. But customers have asked for a number of innovations to make TCP/IP more reliable in mission-critical applications: expanded addressing capability, so it does not run out of addresses, additional security features, to prevent hacker breakins, autoconfiguration, to save installers’ time, and real-time service, to enable transactions. Moving from 32 bit to 128 bit addresses will probably solve the first problem, all vendors agree; but on the other improvements, vendors disagree, and have, so far, refused to agree on standards. Some vendors are offering their own security packages; others are creating new ones specifically to work with TCP/IP. Autoconfiguration, unfortunately, can be done in dozens of ways, and vendors are looking at all of them. Real-time services tend to be the playground of mainframers, so IBM and ATT lead the way, here, with PC vendors trailing badly. Our estimate is that the new standard is at least one year away (due 1999, June), and even then the standard may be a weak one in the real-time and autoconfiguration areas.

See: Brusaw, et al (1997), Hackos & Stevens (1996), Morkes & Nielsen (1997, 1998), Nielsen (1997a, 1997b), Price & Korman (1993), Tarutz (1992).

• Create a title that means something! (October 1, 1998)

• Insert more headlines and subheads.(October 15, 1998)

• Highlight key words, phrases--and links. (November 1, 1998)

• Design each paragraph around one idea. (December 1, 1998)

• Put the idea of the paragraph first. (December 15, 1998)