Dedicated writers, of any type, may strive to incorporate their personal style while communicating their message. This is fine for fiction, but as professional technical writers, we are told, either straight out or in numerous subtleties, that there is no place for individuality in our field.
When we begin, so much of our working day seems to be filling in the blanks. Is there really no art to our writing? Is it all technique and conformity to standards? As we gain experience and skill, we find more and more satisfaction in the well-written concept, in an errorless document, in a book that is as concise as our language will allow. As we grow, we find that our art is in perfecting adherence to the basic precepts of technical writing, rather than in renegading to salve our egos.
Some months after discovering this fact for myself, I ran across an article by David Gelernter, called Truth, Beauty, and the Virtual Machine in Discover Magazine (Sept., 1997; see: http://208.245.156.153/archive/outut.cfm?ID=1211). The author writes about the importance of beauty in computer programming; where beauty means a symbiotic marriage between power and simplicity. I believe that the concepts outlined in Gelernter’s article are applicable to technical writing.
First, realize that the power-simplicity relationship is symbiotic, not symbolic. The beauty that should lead technology and technical writing is not metaphorical or symbolic. It is a mutually interdependent relationship between the two concepts of power and simplicity.
The practical implementations of beauty in technology may go beyond symbiotic to synergetic. A synergetic product is a whole that is greater than the sum of the parts. It is when a developer cleans the code of a software product, inexplicably repairing other bugs and making the whole application run faster and better than before. It is when a technical writer raises the standard of the document beyond fulfillment of customer requirements to a document that is an integral part of a product.
“Bringing power and simplicity to bear doesn’t guarantee machine beauty--just makes it possible, and nothing else does.”
Gelernter says that power in a machine or program is the ability do many tasks. To compare, in technical writing, power would mean comprehensive writing, documenting everything that can be documented in relation to the product. Powerful technical writing is documenting all the tasks that a powerful product can do.
Simplicity is concision. A powerful document may be 350 pages long. When tempered with concise writing, it may become 75 pages long, without taking away from its original power.
“One of the finest artworks ... is the 1938 J3 steam locomotive by Henry Dreyfuss for the New York Central’s 20th Century Limited.... every line serves a purpose, every detail is an indispensable part of the balanced whole, and the finished product has the loveliness of overwhelming power understated.”
Beautiful writing is that in which every line serves a purpose, every detail accepted into the final draft is indispensable, and the finished product is a perfect union of comprehensive instruction and concise communication.
“We say that beauty is subjective, and that’s true up to a point but false beyond, and most of the action takes place beyond.”
True beauty is that which any human, of any society or age, can identify as beautiful. It is not fashion. It is synergy born of purpose and form. It is the sine wave, the Sistine Chapel, the Word Processor without bugs. It is the document in which every word is properly selected and placed.
“Beauty is more important in computing than anywhere else in technology....because software is so complicated. Complexity makes programs hard to build and potentially hard to use; beauty is the ultimate defense against complexity.”
The purpose of technical writing is to make use easy, to make information retrieval and practical troubleshooting as rapid as possible. As this is our purpose of being, it logically follows that technically correct writing is beautiful, in itself. In sad fact, the technical writing of some products may be all that is beautiful about them.
Gelernter wrote that more than training, the difference between a good programmer and an average one was taste, good judgement, aesthetic gifts, and intellectual aggressiveness. All this is true of technical writers as well. Less important than where or how we learned to become technical writers are those characteristics that are either developed on the job or with which we hopefully are born. All of these, along with “intellectual aggressiveness”, allow us to cut down from the wordiness of irrelevant writing of an engineer into the beauty of simple technical writing. When a programmer offers a half-hour lecture on the feature he personally created, we are able to decide whether that information should be written verbatim, within a one-line note, or not included at all. This is the beauty we offer the product; this is how the wondrous complexity of the programmers is brought to the users.
“Not only is your typical software machine hugely complicated on the inside; it offers enormous power and a wide range of functions as well. A taste for beauty is the technologist’s most important ally, also, in his struggle to produce software that people are capable of using effectively.”
When the designers and programmers fail, or even when they succeed, to make the software beautiful (in other words: useful), it is up to the technical writer to enable the user to make the final jump from blackbox mystery to understandable tool. It is up to us to make sure that the technology is beautiful. This is our art.
“No creative symbiosis is possible with an ugly virtual machine-- with a complex or weak program that forces you to bend to its worldview instead of accommodating yours.”
This is the practical moral of our story: write for the user. Use terms and syntax that are understandable. Teach the user, by associating the new technology to what is already known. The beauty of technical writing is not creative writing; it is creatively finding writing solutions to users’ problems. The first and foremost of these problems is the user’s cry to the void: “How the heck do I make this thing work?” If our writing provides an answer, one that decreases the user’s frustrations rather than adding to them, we have created a thing of beauty. We are artists.
Letting Gelernter have the final word:
“Beauty determines which virtual machines triumph and which are rejected, left to rust like old cars in weedy meadows.”