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Stephanie Leary

Writer, Front End Developer, former WordPress consultant

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“Architecting”

January 27, 2004 Stephanie Leary

This is a boot to the head for tech writers everywhere. “Architect” is not a verb. “Architecting” is not a word. The word you are looking for is “designing,” or perhaps you mean “designing and building.” I’m sorry if that phrase is too long for you, but you don’t get to make up new and stupid-sounding words just to fit your column inches, especially when words already exist to describe what you’re talking about. You are not Joss “Can you vague that up for me?” Whedon, and you cannot verb your nouns for shit. You’re not writing popular fiction anyway, so quit trying to be cute and just say what you mean without trying to sound smarter than you are, because sweetie, it just makes you sound like a hack.

Writing

This is an excerpt from Content Strategy for WordPress.My latest books are Content Strategy for WordPress (2015) and WordPress for Web Developers (2013). Sign up to be notified when I have a new book for you.

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Comments

  1. hel says

    January 27, 2004 at 5:06 pm

    I word ya there, sistah. :)

    (yay for sillybean feed!)

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I’m a front end developer at Equinox OLI, working on open source library software. I was previously a freelance WordPress developer in higher education. You can get in touch here or on LinkedIn.

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