By Dana P Skopal, PhD
Working with technical experts and their documents can be a minefield for linguists and plain English editors. Technical information can be complex, and those specialised details may be as clear as mud to the technical experts. However, if you are explaining technical details to a broad audience, especially to persuade them, those details and their accompanying technical jargon may lose your reader if you are not careful.
A plain English editor or technical writer needs to review all the material and decide what is the most relevant information and how to get it 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 information design techniques, planning ‘information order’ and understanding the ‘end-user’ are basic criteria. 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 the device that most readers will be using to read this information. Research has shown that people read differently if the information 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 putting together the technical information, step back and think about the real purpose of the text. Next, think about the end user and 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 technical details. Clear writing means the right combination of:
1. logical information order (macro-structure)
2. document design (layout)
3. using appropriate technical terms with good grammar (micro-structure).
See Skopal, D. P. (2017). Public information documents: understanding readers’ perspectives. In Alison Black, Paul Luna, Ole Lund, & Sue Walker (eds.), Information Design: Research and Practice, 463–476. Routledge.
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