Write like a caveman

Break a style block with a little help from our ancestors.

Let me set the scene.

You are a technical writer. You are revising some documentation or writing something new based on another writer’s words, such as a specification or code comments. The existing style is giving you doubts. Is this the right word? Does this sound normal? You thought you knew how to write a sentence. Are you actually a technical writer?

In the presence of another writer’s (possibly overbearing) style—especially in an unfamiliar domain—it’s easy to get in your own head about what word comes next, or stymied by another writer’s voice.

It’s time to focus on what you have to say and get confident about how you say it. Allow me to present to you one weird trick to get you there.

THAG STRONG. WRITE LIKE THAG.

A painting depicts a family of paleolithic humans wearing animal furs. They are gathered at the entrance of a cave . In the center stands a man carrying a spear. In the distance, a herd of woolly rhinoceros are crossing a river. — A caveman and his family

This guy here with the spear is Thag. Thag is the cartoonish idea of what a caveman is like, with animal pelt clothes, extremely simple tools, and—most important to the task here—simple language skills.

When I start stumbling on the words, I sometimes employ this ridiculous little exercise to right myself:

Write like a caveman. Write like the stereotype of a primitive human, with clipped sentences, poor subject-verb agreement, no articles, and never, ever using a multisyllabic word when a monosyllabic alternative is available. Write like Thag.¹

By writing like a caveman, you’ll do three things:

Identify the essential facts.
Separate the facts from the style in which they’re presented.
Lower the difficulty level of revision, by making a worse text to revise from.

THAG BY EXAMPLE

Here’s how you do it. Start by reading, really reading the text you’re revising (even or perhaps especially if it’s your own). Here’s an almost-real world example, edited to protect the innocent and cut from its original context:

The interface provides the ability to instruct the operating system to render items between event dispatches.

I’m a little stuck on this text because the indirect style implies some sort of subtlety that I need to respect. Is it true? Let’s find out.

In caveman-speak, write down the facts in the shortest, most direct, unadorned terms you can manage:

INTERFACE TELL OPERATING SYSTEM
OPERATING SYSTEM RENDER
ITEM RENDER BETWEEN EVENT

Now, rewrite from this over-the-top exaggerated form, instead of the original text. Use this as the basis to write something that would satisfy the style guide and good taste.

(Now might be a good time to stop and actually try it yourself, to compare your rewrite against mine.)

The interface tells the operating system to render items between events.

I think it’s a dramatic improvement over the caveman speak, but also a tighter, more direct version of the original text.

Are you serious?

If animal pelts don’t suit you, I’ve got a few similar strategies you can try, such as:

Writer, Editor to Adopt Newspaper Headline Style
TURN ON CAPS LOCK BUT OTHERWISE WRITE NORMALLY
write for your livejournal, idk, lol

All of these approaches will help you separate style from content and ease the effort of rewriting.

But personally, the next time I’m stuck with a style problem, I’m going to ask myself: what would Thag do?

Real paleolithic homo sapiens were every bit as smart and strong as contemporary humans. They had rich, expressive grammatical forms. They just lived in a different context than us. Sorry, actual cavemen. ↩

THAG STRONG. WRITE LIKE THAG.

THAG BY EXAMPLE

Are you serious?

Footnotes