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It can be hard to resist the tendency to stretch the facts to support a strongly felt position. Or to serve up half-truths as camouflage for bad news. Or to take refuge in euphemisms. Whenever tempted, remind yourself that intelligent readers develop a nose for all such deceptive writing and are seldom taken in by it.

For the same reason, you should always round out numbers conservatively. Don’t call 6.7 “nearly seven” — call it “over six and a half.”

An obituary writer held in his file an envelope to be opened only when H. L. Mencken died. The message, from the famous writer himself: “Don’t overdo it.”

17. Write so that you cannot be misunderstood

It is not enough to write sentences and paragraphs that your reader can understand. Careful writers are ever alert to the many ways they might be misunderstood.

A student paper began:

My mother has been heavily involved with every member of the California State Legislature.

Some readers might have misunderstood the nature of the energetic mother’s civic involvement.

Ambiguity often results from a single sentence carrying too much cargo. Breaking up your sentences can work wonders. Here is a statement from a report by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission:

It would be prudent to consider expeditiously the provision of instrumentation that would provide an unambiguous indication of the level of fluid in the reactor vessel.

If you break that idea into two sentences, and follow other suggestions in this chapter, you might end up with something like this:

We should make up our minds quickly about getting better gauges. Good gauges would tell us exactly how much fluid is in the reactor vessel.

18. Use plain English even on technical subjects

Annuities rank among the most complex financial products; one survey of investors found only 20 percent claimed a “good understanding” of them. Annuity documents were so impenetrable that the SEC moved to require prospectuses be written in “plain English” to make them more understandable to consumers. Their strategy, reports The Wall Street Journal: LOSE THE BIG WORDS.

A law clerk assigned to rewriting a variable annuity prospectus at Prudential Investments was given this direction: Write it as if you were sending it to someone you know — say, your grandparents.

The more technical the material, the less likely your reader will understand it unless you put it into the language we all speak. An exception is when both writer and reader practice the same technical specialty. An advertising campaign for New York Telephone points up the difference. In one of the advertisements, a company’s telecommunications director talks technical language to other telecommunications specialists:

Given the strategic significance of our telecommunication infrastructure, our fault tolerance to local loop failure left a lot to be desired.

In the same ad, the company’s chief executive, talking to the rest of us, uses different language to make the same point:

If the network goes down, the company goes belly up.

What Business Week calls “technobabble” has aggravated just about everybody one way or another. “Plain English,” says the magazine, “is a language unknown in most of the manuals that are supposed to help us use electronic products.”

If you’re writing to lay readers on a technical subject, test an early draft on a few of them. Finding out what’s clear and what isn’t can be valuable to you in editing. It can make the difference between success and failure in getting across what you want your reader to know, to understand, or to do.

Most murky writing is inadvertent, a sincere if doomed effort to communicate. Far worse is the deliberate attempt to say something that you know readers won’t like in a way that you hope they won’t understand. Let’s call this the techno-euphemism.

A nurse who dropped a baby referred in her report to “the non-facile manipulation of a newborn.”

The uncomfortable writer of an Air Force news release, reporting on a test of a new missile, said that “approximately