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T. R. Girill
Society for Technical Communication/Lawrence Livermore Nat. Lab. (retired)
[email protected]
Technical Writing: Writing With a Sense of Direction
The AI Case
Most AI 'chatbot' large-language models (LLMs) train on huge sets
of disconnected (mostly random) sentences, and aim to generate a
plausible next WORD in a series of words, without actually understanding
either the input text or the output word(s) in the way that a
human would. A recent Science Advances article reports how a team
of Chinese linguists tried a different approach (S. Yu, C. Gu,
K. Huang, and P. Li, 'Predicting the next sentence..,' Science
Advances, 10, 23 May 2024, sadn7744). They trained their LLM on
a coherent corpus of connected sentences and then tried to generate
a plausible next SENTENCE, to gradually build a meaningful document
sentence by sentence. Their experiments showed that just paying
attention to 'a short context length of about 10 words' greatly
improved performance on next-sentence prediction. Furthermore,
just building a text one sentence at a time (instead of isolated word
by word) allowed readers to tap their own pre-existing internal
brain/neuron networks to more effectively interpret the resulting
discourse. AI details aside, there is a general lesson here for
any student struggling to create coherent, useful technical text.
The Human Case
For those student writers who have the basic ability to compose a
science text but don't quite know where to go next, developing
(and sharing) a sense of direction is an appropriate next step.
As mimicked by the LLM case above, this involves looking ahead,
beyond just the next word, and then sharing that perspective
with one's readers.
Audience
Deciding who the intended readers are is of course a writer's
most basic directional decision. Is one addressing fellow
scientists/engineers as a collaborator (such as the text in a
typical chemical's Safety Data Sheet)? Or announcing something
new as a topic leader (as in a science fair project)? Or coaching
novices, as in classroom technique training?
Purpose
The goal of the text is the other great source of sense of
direction beyond audience. Is this text an intellectual exercise
(shares 'research' information?) or a practical one (builds
reader skills or improves safety through training tips)? Is the
writer crafting revealing descriptions or skill-building
instructions? Are we introducing something new or helpfully,
astutely summarizing something familiar in a better way?
Framework
The pace of any document plays out through its structure--the
difference between a bowel of cereal and a tube of toothpaste.
Are readers best served by a few dramatic announcements or a
long metered sequence of steps to follow or precautions to take?
Even figure captions can take a top-down, big-picture approach
or a piece-by-piece geographic tour of visual features.
Signals
Telegraphing purpose and framework decisions through within-text
signals (section heads, step numbers, simple proleptics like
'however' to betray a contrast) meters the flow of text to the
reader's brain. There are times to hurry along and times to
linger and reread carefully, which a helpful writer signals
within the text itself.
Why Bother
Sense of direction is often the hard-to-articulate difference
between an interesting, helpful technical text and a boring,
unhelpful one. As the AI/LLM research linguists above noticed,
a text that kind of makes sense taken a few words at a time but
that ultimately goes nowhere is both unsatisfying and practically
useless. So drafting with one's sense of direction in mind,
and signaling it to readers often, helps create technical text
that is both useful and satisfying to read. As Lewis Carroll
famously explained when Alice didn't know which fork to take
along a branching path, 'it all depends on where you are going.
If you don't care where you are going, it doesn't matter what
path you take.'
[For a big-picture overview of effective technical text, see
http://writeprofessionally.org/techlit/handbooktoc
For more on how students can design effective text, see
http://writeprofessionally.org/techlit/usability]
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