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My career's changed direction twice. While designing roads, I became interested in the software I was using and moved into developing software for civil engineers. To enable my software to be used efficiently, I had to write manuals and present training courses. This highlighted my natural ability to analyse material from the viewpoint of an audience and to present it logically. So that was one key moment.
Another was that around 1980 I read The Complete Plain Words by Sir Earnest Gowers. The book provides a clear message: poor writing requires no effort at all whereas successful writing is the result of hard work. In other words, good writing doesn't just happen, you have to make it happen.
Subsequently, whenever I wrote anything, I analysed it and looked for ways to improve it. When I started working freelance, the emphasis of my work changed from computing to writing and training. Not surprisingly, my first writing jobs were to create users' guides for software.
They provide information that works. It's worth looking at what often happens when other staff create documents as a sideline to their main work: they don't like doing it; they'd rather be doing something else and would be more productive doing it; and they spend a lot of time producing something that doesn't work. In other words, it's false economy. It requires a wide range of skills to create effective documents and it's unrealistic to expect untrained people to do it successfully.
Authors also have a novice's view on subjects and products, providing an opportunity to spot things that aren't noticed by people who are closely involved. Authors are in the same position as readers and will raise the same questions. By capturing this learning process, authors are well on the way to creating successful documents.
Although most companies need to create written information, not many can justify employing an author. In these cases, a freelance author can either write the information or guide staff, providing an opportunity for everyone to concentrate on what they're best at.
Above everything are two things that aren't really skills: authors must be enthusiastic about helping people to obtain knowledge, and they must gain pride from creating documents that convey information accurately and efficiently. Though not teachable, these qualities are usually acquired by anyone who puts the necessary effort into improving their writing. In other words, satisfaction comes from doing a difficult job well.
An author needs an inquiring mind — I only feel confident that I'm on top of a subject when I can't think of any more questions to ask.
Although we talk about writing documents, not many of the elements of creating successful information involve generating text. Three other skills are the foundations of the work: understanding the audience's needs, thinking clearly, and interviewing experts.
Authors who cannot confidently prepare and conduct interviews will never obtain all the required information or fully understand it. But it's not easy.
To avoid wasting an expert's time, I need to prepare questions carefully and conduct interviews efficiently. So in practice an interview is really a series of separate interviews: I ask questions in batches, with one set of answers providing the knowledge to compile the questions for the next batch.
I need to separate what's relevant from what isn't. Therefore, although not familiar with the subject, it's important that I lead an interview — there's often a huge difference between what an expert wants to tell me and what I need to know.
We need to look at this from the viewpoint of experts who are good writers. When writing for their peers, the documents will probably be successful — an example is an academic paper. However, problems often arise when experts write material for non-experts: an expert is likely to find it difficult to analyse the material from a novice's viewpoint. It's worth exploring why this happens.
To explain something successfully, an author needs more than the ability to write English that has a good writing style. Successful explanations take account of the readers: what they already know and how their minds process new information.
It's no good presenting new information in isolation — explanations must include associations to readers' existing knowledge. When experts write for non-experts, they don't always appreciate how important these associations are, so they often omit them. Moreover, when experts review their own writing they do not realise the associations are missing because they know their subject so well. Hence, readers are overloaded: at the same time as processing new information, they have to work out the associations for themselves.
It's also important to present information at a pace that gives readers time to memorise it. Readers cannot simultaneously understand new information and commit it to memory. Therefore, a document must not present new information continuously. Although unable to control reading speed, good authors can compose text that gives readers opportunities to memorise new information. Documents written by experts often fail to do this, resulting in information that is too dense to take in without a struggle.
Any good author can write about unfamiliar subjects that are non-demanding because this needs nothing beyond information-design skills.
However, for unfamiliar subjects in engineering, science and technology, authors need a background that enables them to understand complex, technical material. That's why many authors in these areas are people like me who have moved into writing from other careers.
For complex subjects, it's tough going while building an overview of the subject and researching information.
For a new document, my first goal is to identify the chapter headings, so at first I'm not interested in details, just the broad picture. It's like trying to complete the border of a jigsaw puzzle before starting on the internal pieces — but without all the pieces available or a box showing the picture.
I always want to establish the chapter headings as soon as possible. It gives me a clear view of what the end product will be and it provides a framework for organising all the material I find. I continue this approach when working on individual chapters, trying to identify the main sections from the available material before studying the details.
I've found this approach of working on layers of information is best for me. There's a limit to how much active information I can have in my head and this means I have to choose between two types of information: wide but shallow, or deep but narrow. For complex subjects, the research and interviews are difficult — the hardest work is definitely done before I start writing.
Yes, as an example take software products, which benefit from having an author working with the development team. Often, each person in the team concentrates on a single aspect of the software — for example, specifying the functionality, or developing the code. There's a danger that no one looks at the whole product from the viewpoint of an inexperienced user. The author can fill this gap and assess how well the software communicates with its users.
If an author has trouble describing how to carry out a particular task, it's likely that a menu or a dialogue screen isn't quite right. Similarly, messages are often unhelpful — some being more like a clue for a cryptic crossword than something that helps users. If such problems are found early, the software can be changed.
In menus and messages, consistent terminology is important and this is another area where authors can help.
I've often been confused by inconsistent terminology. The causes are the richness and variety within the English language — it has words that have many different meanings and it also enables us to use different words to convey a single meaning. Although these features can be used positively in creative writing to provide variety and interest, they need to be eliminated in technical documents.
Every technical subject has its own specialist terms and it's here that inconsistency can cause confusion. For technical writing, where our aim is not entertainment but accurately conveying an idea from the author's mind to the reader's mind, we need to remove such confusion. The solution is simple: a term should have only one meaning, and a meaning should be represented by only one term.
For many projects, I've created a glossary of technical terms as early as possible.
The satisfaction of creating order from chaos. By combining my skill in information design with experts' knowledge, we create information that works. It's as simple as that.