It’s been an action-packed year, so I have chosen to focus my brain on keeping my work and home life in order. As a result, I’ve devoted less time to this blog and more time to providing help and advice to my new coworkers. As a way to wrap up 2023, though, I thought I’d share some of the pointers I’ve been sharing at a small-to-medium-size space and defense contractor. May they serve you well in the new year.

Coming Up With Story Ideas

If you’re new to the space or defense business and suddenly find yourself in a social media or outreach role, you might wonder what you can write about that will not require you to obtain an engineering degree. Below are some topics I recommend as a starting point:

• People: The good news about the space biz is that, like every other industry, it concerns people. If you’re working in a technical field, you’re likely to be working among some very bright folks who are accomplishing impressive tasks on or off the job. Interviews with team members on a regular basis can be a good topic for blogs or social media posts.
• Products: Your company might be building very simple (but necessary!) bits of hardware like fasteners or more complex items such as spacecraft or the software that controls them. While your primary audience might be other people in your industry, elected officials, or members of the media, you’re still not writing equations or specific technical details. You don’t want to violate export control laws or give away your company’s patented, proprietary “secret sauce.” So what CAN you write about? In general terms, you can explain
  • What what your hardware or software does
  • How it works
  • What it enables end users to do
  • Why it’s better than anyone else’s stuff

If your work is sufficiently intriguing, a customer will want to contact you to learn more. Include contact information or a form to make that easy for them!

• Processes: Your company might have a way of organizing itself, its work, or its systems that provides your employees or customers with an operational advantage or a “force multiplier.” This is similar to discussing your products, but delves more into how they are used.
• Publicity: Company leaders like to see and celebrate “wins.” In the space and defense industry, you can have multiple types of wins:
  • Proposals–Customer X just awarded you (and any partners) a contract worth X dollars to do Y.
  • Production–You finished building/coding your new hardware/software.
  • Progress–You completed a design review and are ready to move on to the next stage of deploying your product
• Politics: Members of your team might visit or be visited by elected officials, agency leaders, or high-ranking officers. Publicize those efforts without oversharing the purpose of their visit.

Editorial Tips

A lot of my current work comprises proposal, engineering, and internal document editing. Below are the sorts of editorial items I correct most often.

Dangling Modifiers

An example of a dangling modifier would be something like this (example fictitious):

A starship’s primary defensive weapons are phasers and photon torpedoes. These are limited, however, because they contain antimatter and so present storage safety hazards.

The dangling modifier appears in the second sentence: these. What does “these” refer to? It could be the phasers, the photon torpedoes, or both. Which one was intended might be clear to the writer, but the reader might have questions.

The best way to handle dangling modifiers is to treat “these” or similar words (that, those, etc.) as adjectives rather than nouns. That way, if they’re adjectives, they must have a noun to describe. The corrected sentence, then, could appear as follows:

These torpedoes are limited, however, because they contain antimatter and so present storage safety hazards.

Splitting Verbs

Oddly enough, like the example above, one of the most often-quoted verb splitting also comes from Star Trek: 

Its ongoing mission: to explore strange, new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before.

The troublesome phrase for your friendly, neighborhood English major is “to boldly go.” The proper construction is “to go boldly,” as spoken correctly in the first episode of Star Trek: Enterprise (around 1:30).

Another verb-splitting example would be:

The passive sensors are constantly collecting data from the space surrounding the ship.

The problematic word, again, is the adverb “constantly” between “are” and “collecting.” There are a couple of ways you can reword this sentence:

Try:

The passive sensors are collecting data constantly from the space surrounding the ship.

Or:

The passive sensors constantly collect data from the space surrounding the ship.

The point of this word shuffling is to make the verb more grammatically sound, make the sentence easier to read, or both.

Burying the Verb

I’ll let this one speak for itself:

The warp drive, which the crew was repairing while the ship was fighting a battle in the Mutara Sector, went offline.

Where’s the verb in this sentence? Part of the answer lies with answering the question, “Who is the primary actor in this sentence?”

Assume this is a technical after-action report. The sentence started with the warp drive, so let’s treat the warp drive as the subject taking action (the actor). In that case, the sentence might look like this:

The warp drive went offline while the crew was repairing it during a battle in the Mutara Sector.

The verb appears right after the subject, not at the end of the sentence.

Let’s say you want to focus on the crew’s actions. Your sentence might read as follows:

The engineering crew repaired the warp drive, which went offline while the bridge crew fought a battle in the Mutara Sector.

In this second case, I added another part of the crew to distinguish who was doing what. In both cases, the actors (engineering crew, bridge crew) are located close to their actions (repaired, fought). Of course, this sentence adds some ambiguity because it’s not clear that the bridge crew and the engineering crew are both on the ship, in the Mutara Sector. Another sentence might be required to clarify things:

While the ship was engaged in battle in the Mutara Sector, the engineering crew repaired the warp drive, which went offline.

The nifty thing about writing is that you can reach the same destination by more than one path. Which path you take depends greatly on your context. May your writing take you on adventurous paths in 2024!