FROM MY LIFE AS A WRITER

I’ve been a trainer, technical writer, and instructional designer in one capacity or another for nearly 40 years.  I’ve worked in basic manufacturing, semiconductor manufacturing,, customer service, tech support, and Napoleonic infantry tactics, in settings from factories to offices to call centers to grassy fields and brush-choked gullies.  A recent conversation put me in mind of some things I’ve learned along the way that I can just about guarantee you’ll never hear in a class on writing or instructor training.

There probably aren’t many people still living who actually do that kind of work anymore, but in the off chance one of you long-suffering old warriors should stumble upon this, I hope it helps, or at least makes you smile.

Words mean things.  I was using that long before I heard Rush Limbaugh use it, and I got it from Leonard Piekoff in the early-80s.  It doesn’t matter what language we’re talking about; the words of that language mean things.  Actually, a word stands for a concept.

Okay.  Back up a little.  The human consciousness operates on different levels.  The first, lowest, or most basic level is that of sensory perceptions.  That’s where we see, hear, smell, touch, or taste something.  The bit of sensory information that is fed from our sense organs to our brain is called a “percept.”  Most percepts, by themselves, don’t amount to much, one notable exception being pain.  If this is the first time we’ve encountered this thing, that little bit of information is tossed on the table by the door of our minds and left there.  If we’ve encountered this before, or something like it, now we have two percepts, and those can be combined to form the next level of our awareness, a “percept.”  We go from being aware of “A” thing to being aware of “THAT” thing.

A percept is a combination of distinct percepts   (PER as in “PERception.”  PRE as in “PREvious,” or “Before.”)  A precept contains enough information to allow us to say, “Oh, that again,” the next time we encounter it.

When we get enough information on this thing that we need to be able to remember it, we give it a name, or a word, which will stand for that thing in our minds.  This collection of PREcepts tied together by a word is a CONcept.

From now on, whenever we encounter this thing, we have a name for it.  We can tell our friends about it.  Rather than listing all the distinct sensory features of the thing – size, color, texture, smell, etc. – we can just say, “That’s a skunk.”  So words stand for concepts. Without words, or language, Man’s conceptual consciousness could not function.  Would that be a problem?  Oh, my, yes!

Consider a computer.  We all know what a computer is because we’ve heard that word and seen it applied to a specific type of thing.  If we didn’t have that word, we’d have to list all the components of the thing:  resistors, capacitors, diodes, transistors, circuit boards, cables, soldier, smoke, etc.  (All electrical devices operate on smoke; when you let the smoke out of them, they no longer function.)  Our conceptual consciousness, enabled by language, allows us to contemplate or discuss truly enormous bodies of sensory data with a single word.  We can speak blithely of the Universe, or Mankind, or food, or anything else for which we have a word.  For example, consider the enormous amount of information referred to in the sentence, “This is the greatest food Mankind has discovered anywhere in the Universe.”

“A concept is a mental integration of two or more units possessing the same distinguishing characteristic(s) with their particular measurements omitted.”  [Ayn Rand, “Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology”]   You can’t beat the classics.

Let’s reduce the scale a bit and talk about a ball.  Any ball has certain characteristics that make it a ball – “round” is the most essential, considering tennis balls, footballs, cannonballs, etc.  When we hear the word “ball,” we are able to visualize precisely to what the speaker is referring.  When we see a round object, we first identify it by the “GENUS” of its definition.  The genus is the larger group of things to which the object belongs – balls.  We can further identify it by the “SPECIES” of its definition.  The species is the features of this particular ball.  It’s a round ball (eliminating footballs) it’s red, (eliminating all other colors) it’s solid rubber (eliminating air-filled balls or those made of anything other than rubber) it’s three inches in diameter (eliminating all other sizes of balls, and pretty well nailing this one down.)

“Genus” is the group; “Species” is the individual.  Consider a brown horse.  “Horse” is the genus, brown is the species.  However, there can be many layers of species:  “large, bay, Clydesdale gelding.”  Don’t worry about remembering all this.  It works, I promise.

The really wonderful, and I would say, “Miraculous” thing about our conceptual consciousness is that it operates with almost unimaginable speed.  In fact, unless we have studied this stuff, we aren’t even aware of what’s happening.  When we hear “Red, rubber ball,” we don’t have to go through all that other sorting.  Our minds almost instantaneously go down the page, as it were, to find “ball,” then, “red,” then, “rubber,” and we’re done.

Concepts can be stacked, too.  For example, “Airplane” stands for a vast number of concepts, each referring to an individual part.  Generally, bigger or more technical words stand for more sub-concepts than do shorter or more basic words, and this, brothers and sisters, is the point of this essay!

If you are writing something that is to be read by a specific audience, you must have a pretty good idea of the audience’s vocabulary and general educational level.  For example, if you refer to a “Cantilevered buttress,” an architect or mechanical engineer would know exactly what you are talking about.  Someone with, say, a reading comprehension level of the 2^nd half of the third grade, or for whom English is not their milk tongue, you just lost them.

I worked for a time as a technical writer and instructional designer for a huge international corporation.  Our site management brought in an outfit to test the comprehension level of the workforce, and it came out to be the 2^nd half of the 3^rd grade.  This average included management and engineering in the total, so you can imagine what the hourly workers on the factory floor were like.  Knowing that made a huge difference in my work.  I knew that if I said, “Adjust the X, Y, and Z axes to position the insertion holes directly under the head,” about one in 20 students would understand.  I had to use smaller words that stood for smaller concepts.  That instruction became: “Turn the X-positioning knob to move the table left or right so that the holes are about in front of or behind the head.  Then use the Y-positioning knob to move the table forward or backward so that the holes are about lined up with the head from left to right.  Use the positioning knobs to correct the position of the holes so they are directly under the head.”  Eventually, I realized that even this structure was too complex for many of my students, so I had to break it down even more, and include more illustrations.  I also had to break down any compound or complex sentences to simple sentences because commas just blew their little minds – and semi-colons were like quantum physics!

As you can see, the text of the more basic instruction is much longer than that of the more complex, or higher-level instruction, and that brings us to a trap in all this:  if you use too many words, the lower-functioning students can actually get lost in the verbiage – before they get to the end, they’ve forgotten where they started – and if you make it too basic, the higher-functioning students will be bored or insulted.  The only solution I found to this problem was to put students in classes with others of about the same ability.  Neither did I ever find a real formula, or any sort of rules for knowing how to present something.  If you are in such a situation, all I can suggest is that you start out at the most basic level possible and work your way up until you lose them, then back it off a bit.

Something else to be conscious of is slang and idiom.  In an effort to amuse and engage one very bright student in a large class, I referred to a component as “…that little booger.”  The ensuing epistemological carnage was truly a thing to behold, but it didn’t get my students trained.  A few words, in particular, that I learned to not use are “Once” and “Utilize.”  Both are perfectly functional words, but if you say, “Once you have finished this adjustment, go to the next,” you will confuse your ESL (English as a Second Language) students who understand “Once” to mean, “One time.”  Instead, use “After,” or “When you have finished….”

I once worked (See, there’s a totally different usage of “once!”) with an engineer who would write his manufacturing procedures, then give them to me to edit.  He invariably used the word “Utilize” instead of “Use,” and I invariably changed every instance to “Use.”  He’d send the procedure back to me with every “Use” red-lined, and demand that I change them back to “Utilize.”

In one of my classes on the operation of an X-Y plotter, one of my students would be doing fine, but at a certain point, she’d freeze up and be almost paralyzed.  After a few days of this, I sat down with her and, after considerable pampering and encouraging, got her to tell me what was going on.  She’d grown up on Java during the Japanese occupation, and had seen things no little girl ought to see.  Because this particular machine required operator input to make it do certain things, I’d been saying, “Now you can execute the program.”  This poor dear had a mental picture of “execute” that had never occurred to me!

Using very small words is not guaranteed to be successful, either.  In the middle of my explanation of how the X-Y plotter worked, one woman fell apart.  I asked her what in the world was wrong.  She tearfully wailed, “I can’t say big words like “X” and “Y!””

Learn to be conscious of the level of concepts you are using in your writing.  Get in the habit of being absolutely obsessive over consistency, that is, using the same word to refer to the same thing every time.  (When I worked for Verizon Wireless, I went through one of our training documents and found where one, particular word was used for three totally different concepts.  In that same document, I found a single concept for which four different words were used.)

Oh, and here’s something else that is often ignored:  parallel construction.  If you start by listing parts A, B, and C, don’t change to C, A, and B.  Always use the same order.  This is obviously critical if there is a sequence of events, but even if there isn’t such a sequence, don’t speak of A first in one paragraph, and B first in another.  (Another of Verizon Wireless’ documents, a programming instruction, had nine steps.  Step eight said, “Before beginning step three, you must….”  These documents were written by people with advanced degrees.  Humpf.)