Unnecessary Obfuscation

The e-mail came to me at work one day, bearing the Subject line “Would you sign a petition to ban this substance?”. It started as a joke, passed around the office to see how many of the adults were fooled by it. It triggered a thought in my own mind about a) how unnecessarily convoluted some writers make their content and b) how easy it is to confuse readers in this information-glutted age with dense content and what a former manager used to call “$13 vocabulary words.”

BAN DIHYDROGEN MONOXIDE!

Dihydrogen monoxide is colorless, odorless, tasteless, and kills uncounted thousands of people every year. Most of these deaths are caused by accidental inhalation of DHMO, but the dangers of dihydrogen monoxide do not end there. Prolonged exposure to its solid form causes severe tissue damage. Symptoms of DHMO ingestion can include excessive sweating and urination, and possibly a bloated feeling, nausea, vomiting and body electrolyte imbalance. For those who have become dependent, DHMO withdrawal means certain death.

Dihydrogen monoxide:

- is also known as hydroxl acid, and is the major component of acid rain.
- contributes to the “greenhouse effect.”
- may cause severe burns.
- contributes to the erosion of our natural landscape.
- accelerates corrosion and rusting of many metals.
- may cause electrical failures and decreased effectiveness of automobile brakes.
- has been found in excised tumors of terminal cancer patients.

Contamination is reaching epidemic proportions! Quantities of dihydrogen monoxide have been found in almost every stream, lake, and reservoir in America today. But the pollution is global, and the contaminant has even been found in Antarctic ice. DHMO has caused millions of dollars of property damage in the midwest, and recently California.

Despite the danger, dihydrogen monoxide is often used:

- as an industrial solvent and coolant.
- in nuclear power plants.
- in the production of Styrofoam.
- as a fire retardant.
- in many forms of cruel animal research.
- in the distribution of pesticides. Even after washing, produce remains contaminated by this chemical.
- as an additive in certain “junk-foods” and other food products. Companies dump waste DHMO into rivers and the ocean, and nothing can be done to stop them because this practice is still legal. The impact on wildlife is extreme, and we cannot afford to ignore it any longer!

The American government has refused to ban the production, distribution, or use of this damaging chemical due to its “importance to the economic health of this nation.” In fact, the navy and other military organizations are conducting experiments with DHMO, and designing multi-billion dollar devices to control and utilize it during warfare situations. Hundreds of military research facilities receive tons of it through a highly sophisticated underground distribution network. Many store large quantities for later use.

Dihydrogen monoxide is, yep, plain old water. Snopes.com provides a full history of this petition, which one student used for a science fair project (about the gullibility of people and, more specifically, the impact of peer pressure on critical thinking) that ultimately won first prize. The account is both hilarious and sad; spoof petitions about dihydrogen monoxide have fooled teen-agers and adults, Average Joes and Joe Politicians, alike.

Snopes observed that the petition’s success in fooling people has “prompted the usual round of outcries about how our ignorant citizenry doesn’t read critically and can be easily misled.” It adds that “with a little effort, even the most innocuous of substances can be made to sound like a dangerous threat to human life.” 

“Ignorant,” while perhaps appropriate in some cases, is likely too harsh a word to be applied generally. Certainly, I think there’s a lot of people out there who aren’t truly paying attention to what they’re reading. More accurately, there’s a lot of people out there who are so busy that they’re doing more scanning these days than actual reading.

If that’s the case (and, as technical writers, we know too often that it is), it puts continued pressure on writers in any field to write in Plain English, to be crystal clear about the objectives of their individual documents, and to craft content that, if it still can’t get readers to slow down and read, will at least enable them to scan without forming misconceptions in their minds. 

To accomplish this, writers have to be as demanding of their own content as they are of content produced by others, and be ruthlessly critical of everything from word choices to headings to document structure and more. In upcoming posts, I’ll share some tools and aids that will help you do this.