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T. R. Girill
Society for Technical Communication/Lawrence Livermore Nat. Lab. (retired)
[email protected]
Technical Writing: Professional Tips That Help Students Too
Many careers that do not superficially seem to demand effective
writing--scientist, engineer, economist--actually call for
extensively, cogently communicating with others. So some people
in those careers turn to professional writing coaches to help them
with their words. Varanya Chaubey is such a coach, and she recently
contrasted two quite different writing situations that she helps
her writing clients address. Half of her advice is especially
relevant for student STEM writers as well [V. Chaubey, 'Treating
Research Writing: Symptoms and Maladies,' arXiv.org, March 2023,
2012.07787.pdf).
Some of Chaubey's professional clients are very fluent but unfocused.
Indeed, their communication problems often stem from having too many
words, literally: they often find themselves with a draft that 'is
too long for what it says' (Chaubey, p. 14). For them, Chaubey's
advice aims at achieving effective conciseness.
But a second slice of those that Chaubey coaches have the opposite
problem: they are not fluent at all, and struggle to generate
enough words to share their technical thoughts with colleagues
effectively. Some are not very verbal in any language; others are
non-native English speakers who--like ESL STEM students--find it
hard to quickly summon appropriate English verbal strategies when
they really need them. Hence, Chaubey's communication advice for
this second set of professionals proves very relevant for non-fluent
STEM student writers as well.
Write 'Dialogically'
Chaubey advises technical professionals who struggle to find
enough words that they should think about the audience they hope
to address (peers? clients? people in other professions?) and regard
their (draft) text 'as a dialog with the reader' (p. 4). This can
get their stalled 'telling' process started as a written conversation.
Make Logical Links Explicit
A writer who is unfolding their technical analysis or argument over
a series of sentences should make that verbal path overt for the
reader: 'you can deliberately repeat key terms from [each] previous
sentence' as you draft the next (p. 10). This can be overdone and
sound wooden, of course. But giving the reader a clear, overtly
signaled logical path is crucial for their understanding--after all,
they may be READING the text in a second or third language, just
as the writer may be drafting in one.
Make Each Paragraph's Role Obvious
'Articulate in one sentence the point readers expect to see next...
[then] construct the rest of the paragraph to support this point'
(p. 12). Chaubey assumes that the writer has at least a mental list
of points that they plan to share and that some thought has been
given to ordering them. But it does enable the struggling writer
to meaningfully advance their list of claims, which hopefully form
an interesting, useful, argumentative sequence.
Explicitly Repeat Key Terms
'The [overt] appearance of key terms across consecutive first
sentences' (p. 13)--perhaps 'cancer', 'efficiency', or 'method X'
--can help readers psychologically connect a sequence of paragraphs
into a coherent argument or a well-constructed analysis, instead of
being just disconnected blobs of technical text. Such signaling
is the paragraph-level version of the similar sentence-level
suggestion above, and builds fluency piecemeal for the same reason.
This is not exotic advice, but still valuable to those struggling
technical writers who don't discover it on their own.
So while some working scientists and other professionals flounder
with technical text because they generate too many (big) words
and can't control their focus, others have the problem shared with
many students--insufficient fluency to generate all the words
they need to summarize and signal their technical claims to strangers.
In those cases, Chaubey's advice to the experts is well suited to
give an authentic, practical boost to the students who--for
whatever reason--also can't find the basic verbal moves that
they need.
[For a dictionary of English-language science idioms, see
http://writeprofessionally.org/techlit/science-idioms
For more on adjusting text features to meet reader needs, see
http://writeprofessionally.org/techlit/usability]
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