RE: Writing to your audience

["Dan Goldstein" <DGoldstein -at- riverainmedical -dot- com>]

If we're given an impossible (or improbable) communcation task, it's our
job to alert management to the risk of miscommunication. That's still
not the audience's fault.


-----Original Message-----
From: Porrello, Leonard
Sent: Monday, February 28, 2011 1:32 PM
To: 'Phil'; Dan Goldstein
Cc: techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
Subject: RE: Writing to your audience

Interesting story about NASA, but I am not sure that's the real story. A
documentary I saw indicated that it was more a matter of willful
ignorance (on the part of management) than either a want of
communication or an inability to understand. Be that as it may,
sometimes material is too complex for even some members of the target
audience to comprehend.

Einstein stated, "Everything should be kept as simple as possible, but
no simpler." There is no guarantee after you have made everything "as
simple as possible" that everyone in even your target audience will
understand what you are talking about. Granted, in the case of NASA, the
engineers may have culpably failed to reduce their message into language
that even my toddler could understand: "If you launch now, the whole
thing may go big boomie!" But even had they used such a description, it
would have provided little to help the technicians who were tasked with
repairing the shuttle. The techs would have required detailed, technical
information that may have simply been beyond the ken of project
managers. Similarly, while Sachse's writing may not have been simple
enough of Popular Mechanics, he may have described his structure as
simply as possible, and that may have been beyond the grasp of his
reviewers.

Before we can damn Sachse as a poor communicator, I think we have to
look at how those who eventually validated his structure talked about
it. Was what they wrote significantly more comprehensible then what
Sachse wrote?

As tech writers, we need to ensure that our "target audience"
understands what we are writing. At the same time, we have to admit that
it is theoretically possible to be tasked with writing about a topic
that is complex to the point that certain people in even the target
audience may be incapable of understanding it. (In which case, you may
say that the target audience hasn't been defined well enough, but that
is another argument.)

"It's never the audience's fault if they fail to understand me" is an
aphorism, not a truism.


^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Create and publish documentation through multiple channels with Doc-To-Help.
Choose your authoring formats and get any output you may need. Try
Doc-To-Help, now with MS SharePoint integration, free for 30-days.
http://www.doctohelp.com

---
You are currently subscribed to TECHWR-L as archive -at- web -dot- techwr-l -dot- com -dot- 

To unsubscribe send a blank email to
techwr-l-unsubscribe -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
or visit http://lists.techwr-l.com/mailman/options/techwr-l/archive%40web.techwr-l.com


To subscribe, send a blank email to techwr-l-join -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com

Send administrative questions to admin -at- techwr-l -dot- com -dot-  Visit
http://www.techwr-l.com/ for more resources and info.

Please move off-topic discussions to the Chat list, at:
http://lists.techwr-l.com/mailman/listinfo/techwr-l-chat