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T. R. Girill
Society for Technical Communication/Lawrence Livermore Nat. Lab. (retired)
[email protected]
Technical Writing: Conciseness as an Audience Need
Several years ago, two instructors at the Qatar campus of Texas A&M
University surveyed their former technical writing students on the
communications skills that the students found they really needed out
in the world of working international engineers (A. Hodges and L.
Seawright, 'Writing in Transnational Workplaces,' IEEE Transactions
on Prof. Comm., 62:3, Sept. 2019, 295-309). Their overwhelming
response cited not any specific genre (reports?) nor any specific
format (companies have their own), but rather a crucial writer/reader
relationship: conciseness.
The Missed Authentic Goal
The former students, now working engineers, reported that in school
they had been rewarded for verbosity--fluently filling up draft
documents with English words to please their teachers. However on their
jobs, readers wanted just enough words to meet their professional
needs but no more. Bosses demanded concise executive summaries of
a project. Colleagues expected focused, terse overviews of meetings
or presentations missed. Clients sought thorough but brief product
documentation.
Relevant conciseness was an authentic on-the-job writing goal that
somewhat surprised Hodges and Seawright. 'Misunderstanding the level
of detail needed [in a technical text] has consequences in the
workplace' (305, col. 1) they discovered. Hence 'understanding how
to summarize events, meetings, documents, e-mail messages,
correspondence, and [even] conversations is a core skill needed
by working engineers' (304, col. 2).
Audience Defines Relevance
One key difference between in-school writing practice and on-the-job
technical writing is of course audience. The appropriate 'level of
detail' for any text in any beyond-school setting is driven by that
text's audience.
In the STEM world beyond the classroom readers pursue texts of all
kinds (from small e-mails to huge reference manuals) to help them
successfully perform workplace tasks (carry out a process, assess
a result, fix a problem, address a client's needs, make something
new or apply something old in a new way--including software). A
text's details must be rich enough, relevant enough, and clear
enough to enable the audience's task, but words beyond that are
unneeded, even distracting or confusing, and certainly time
consuming.
Hence, audience needs are what make concise workplace STEM text
so highly valued. Words that address audience needs earn their
place, but additional words (that at most demonstrate the verbal
skill of the writer but fail to support any reader tasks) are
unhelpful, even confusing or distracting.
Practicing Conciseness
So how can you encourage students--writing to impress you--to
practice appropriate textual conciseness in school so that they
will be ready to meet the expectation of it on their jobs? One
possibility is to pair the content of practice assignments with
one (or more) designated (pseudo)audiences. Is this draft project
abstract or Safety Data Sheet section aimed at an expert chemist?
a local construction manager? a policy-maker? a concerned parent?
Different audiences make different levels of detail (framed in
different vocabularies) appropriate. Thus student writers can
practice tuning a text's conciseness to explicitly address both
the preparation and the impatience of different beyond-school
readers.
[Want more background on technical writing in science class? See
http://writeprofessionally.org/techlit/handbooktoc
Want to explore how text usability supports social justice? See
http://writeprofessionally.org/techlit/usability ]
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