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T. R. Girill
Society for Technical Communication/Lawrence Livermore Nat. Lab. (retired)
[email protected]
Technical Writing: Vocabulary Choices Influence Reader Attention
Recent empirical research comparing different headlines for the
same newspaper story reveals its key result in its title:
'Reading Dies in Complexity' (Hillary Shulman and others, Science
Advances, 5 June 2024, vol.10, eadn2555, 8 pages). Using standard
measures (readability scores, character count) to gauge a headline's
linguistic complexity, Hillary Shulman's team found that the
'click-through rate' (to retrieve the associated news story) was
significantly less when headlines were verbally complex. Their
explanation: 'overwhelmingly, general readers are economical with
their attention,' on which verbally complex headlines and stories
place greater demands. But this finding contains within it a
solution strategy: 'small-scale efforts aimed at increasing the
simplicity or fluency of language can increase the attention of
casual readers' to factual text.
Some writers who appreciate this advice in the abstract
nevertheless have trouble carrying it out. Fortunately, there is
a tool to get them started. A real-life case shows how.
An Authentic Case
A recent (free) publication of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences
vividly illustrates both the relevance of this 'attention management'
strategy and the need to apply it to boost text impact. In June,
2024, the Academy issued a report that deserves wide readership
but may never get it because of careless vocabulary choices,
especially in the title (which influences readership just like
a newspaper headline).
This 2024 report discusses how climate change has complicated the
health-and-safety task of guessing how much rain and snow that
any geographic area can absorb each season. Unfortunately, the
report ended up with the attention-swamping title 'Modernizing
Probable Maximum Precipitation Estimation' (nap.nationalacademies.org/
read/27460, June 2024, free online).
PMP (probable maximum precipitation) is a standard weather term
and its abbreviation. But featuring it in a report title is
probably not the best way to connect this important technical
topic with a broad public decision-making audience.
Crafting a Textual Alternative
Here is where the writer-aid tool, easily available to any student,
comes into play. The tool is called an intermediate dictionary.
An intermediate dictionary includes almost as many entries as a
regular dictionary (about 10,000), but each is defined using only
words that an eighth-grade reader can understand (several brands
are in print). Using an intermediate dictionary transforms the
words in the PMP report title along these lines: 'probable' becomes
'likely,' 'maximum' becomes 'largest,' 'precipitation' becomes
'rainfall,' and 'estimation' becomes 'guess.' So this helps the
writer--including any student--develop an alternative report
title, such as 'Guessing the largest likely rainfall.'
The revised version makes the relevant technical point with
much smaller demands on reader attention. Then, with the reader
engaged, the formal PMP abbreviation can emerge to gently connect
the technical discussion to the problem's more formal analysis
and vocabulary.
Everyone wants students who write about science to learn and display
appropriate technical vocabulary. But as the above empirical
study reveals, 'appropriate' has an audience aspect as well as
a field/content aspect. Going overboard is apparently easy, and
reader disengagement is often the result--not good in school or
(as the National Academy case shows) in life.
[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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