By Dana P Skopal, PhD
Technical information can be complex, and those technical details may be as clear as mud to some readers. However, if you are explaining technical details to a broad audience, those details and their accompany technical jargon may well lose your reader if you are not careful.
A technical writer (or a plain English editor) needs to review all the material and decide what is the most relevant information to get across. If all the information is important, then a writer needs to think about a logical order and how to use information design to guide a reader. Regardless of which approach, the document’s purpose is also fundamental. A writer should ask themselves why is this text important and what is crucial for a reader to understand about the technical details.
When thinking about adopting information design techniques, planning information order and understanding the end-user are basic criteria. One question to ask is how will your reader approach the information. Do you know if your readers will read from beginning to end or will they search for key words? As people read differently, we encourage writers to do some usability testing if the text’s details need to be understood and used accurately.
Another factor is what device will most readers be using to take in this information. Research has shown that people read differently if the material is on a computer screen or presented as a printed document. If the technical details are dense, readers may use different reading strategies to locate and understand any details or processes, and these strategies can change if they are reading on a computer or reading on paper.
If you are a manger, step back and think about the real purpose of the text. Next, think about the end user and then plan what information design can work best for your technical details. From our research, it is clear that understanding ‘how people read’ has lessons for the way we write and present details. Clear writing means the right combination of:
- macro-structure (logical order)
- document design (layout)
- micro-structure, or grammar and using appropriate terms.
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