ABSTRACT
I am often asked for advice on how to avoid ambiguity in technical writing. One answer I can offer is the use of carefully controlled language, limited in vocabulary and structures, as described in section 7.4. But such a form of 'controlled' English will not meet all our needs in writing technical texts. To communicate the shades of meaning and nuances of tone in subtle and complex description and argument, we need to use the full range of the resources of English. In such circumstances, I have to give a different answer to the question about avoiding ambiguity. The answer is: we can't. As readers or listeners we can, if we wish, wilfully misconstrue almost any statement, especially one that contains general rather than special vocabulary. In reading an article about new designs for trains and stations, we may smile momentarily at the double meaning of the statement The buffer will have an inflated head. But it is really our own fault if we are distracted from the intended information about a mechanical device by an image of a human being with a peculiar physical shape. Normally, we do not decode messages by looking for the least likely meanings that can be attached to the signals we receive. We do not receive and interpret the signals in isolation: we take into account the whole context in which they are being used. We consider the general linguistic surroundings of the particular signals; we consider the general theme that is being discussed, or the total object that is being described; we consider the writer's personality, education, occupation and experience, and the atmosphere pervading the communication situation as a whole. All these things are taken into account as we consider possible interpretations. This means that sentences including the following groups of words, which some people would condemn as ambiguous, would normally give no trouble: ... acquires a pitch that is in proportion to the distance the bat is away from the reflecting object. These stages consist basically of staircase generators. The meanings we draw from pitch and bat vary according to whether they are included in a discussion of ultrasonic guidance systems (as here) or a sports report; and indeed their sporting meanings depend on the game being discussed and on whether the context is British or American. No reader is likely to be seriously confused. Likewise, no reader of the electronics journal from which the second extract was taken would deduce that the stages consist of machines busily producing staircases! So in this chapter I want to stress the impossibility of avoiding ambiguity entirely in the use of words. But let me make clear what
type of ambiguity I am referring to when I make that statement: I am referring to the ambiguity that arises when we can make any of several possible responses to correctly formed and correctly presented code signals. My purpose here is not to excuse the types of ambiguity that arise from 'common errors' in sentence construction, syntax and punctuation - that is, from ill-formed and ineptly presented code signals. For example, I am not excusing ambiguity that arises from misused participial constructions. The problem of contamination by bacteria and yeast was a major difficulty and after running for about two weeks the mammalian cells were found to be non-viable.
