This topic has been knocking around in my head for a while now, so it’s about time to post about it.

One of the limitations of the written word is that we lose meaning as compared to in-person interaction. According to one of my college textbooks, Looking Out / Looking In by Adler and Towne, social scientists peg the amount of meaning we derive from body language at 65%. We also take a lot of meaning from vocal tone. We leave about 9% for the words themselves.

Writing does have voice and tone, but they’re not the same as in speech. Still, writing can carry emotion to the point that you can tell the writer’s mood. Writers have to be careful.

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I recently finished reading Word Wizard, a collection of essays by Richard Lederer. (If you’ve ever been forwarded the email that asks why if we say “tooth” and “teeth,” why don’t we pluralize “booth” as “beeth,” Lederer’s the guy who wrote those musings.) Two of the essays struck me as ironic, but it’s likely that I noticed the irony only because the two pieces were placed near each other in the book.

One is called “Cut the Verbal Fat,” and the other, “Add Wealth to your Vocabulary.”

They seem contradictory at first glance. But are they?

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Now that the STC Summit is over, the session that sticks out in my mind the most is Ginny Redish’s one on “writing as an asynchronous conversation.” I don’t think I had heard of Ginny before the conference, even though apparently she’s about as famous as you can get in the technical communication field. But once the session was over, I could see why she had reached that level.

In one hour, Ginny gave the audience a clear understanding of the topic and how it applies to everyday work. That’s one of the things I really wanted out of the conference: some specific ways of looking at my writing and seeing how it can improve, or specific devices for better instructional content.

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I’ve put some thought lately into the idea of incorporating more narrative text in my documentation. I’m a fan of stories myself—aside from the fact that I enjoy adventure books. When I’m listening to a speaker or reading an article, I mentally perk up when what is apparently a narrative comes along. Narrative grabs my attention.

Why couldn’t I do the same thing in my technical writing? I have, to some extent. One manual I’ve written contains examples that are set apart in the text rather than being introduced with wording like “For instance.” I did it as a mechanism to show how a possibly real-world situation applies to the software I documented. I wasn’t really thinking about the narrative itself, though.

When I was a writing tutor in college (Look! There’s some narrative now…. Come to think of it, the previous paragraph had some, too….), I’d tell students that narrative is an effective writing tool because people identify closely with it. It’s a core part of our linguistic abilities. Whenever your colleague asks you what you did over the weekend and you tell him, you engage in narrative.

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A coworker and I talked a bit about this post yesterday, and she brought up the fact that being a technical writer helps in the creative writing realm. This idea is taking a view 180 degrees from the view that that post took, but I have thought about that view a little more and seen that there is more crossover than I had explored. Of course, there are some basic differences, too.

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In a previous post, I wrote about the irony of technical writers not following directions. It made me think about the expectations I bring to online help or a set of printed instructions written by someone else. I think that because of their profession, technical communicators approach documentation differently than users in other fields.

Personally, I come to others’ documentation with a set of expectations. I’m critical at the same time that I’m sympathetic.

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Group brainstorming sessions can be effective forums for finding solutions to a problem or thinking of new approaches to a task. You have people with varying backgrounds and attitudes that will all think of different things, and when you collectively sift out the less effective ideas and further discuss the good ones, you’ll generally arrive at a solution that is beneficial for all concerned.

However, what can you do when you don’t have access to a group or you’re brainstorming about something personal?

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