다음을 통해 공유

Can ignorance serve a purpose?

  • 아티클

Perhaps a more precise question would be, can technical knowledge impede a technical writer's effectiveness?

A recent article on BBC News, "Computer terms confuse workers, reports that a survey showed that "three quarters of workers waste more than an hour a week deciphering what a technical term means." The same page links to similar articles:

  • "Geek speak confuses net users" (Apr 05)
  • "Hi-tech babble baffles many" (Jul 03)
  • "People confused by wi-fi jargon" (Aug 03)

I don't think that problem is news anymore. It can be argued that this is why technical writers are needed: to translate technical terms (geek speak, hi-tech babble, jargon) into language the user can understand.

But as you learn those technical terms so you can write about them, they become familiar. And after awhile, you can forget that they might be a foreign language to some people. Take the examples given in the BBC News article:

"Terms such as jpeg, javascript and cookies are among the problem words highlighted by the firm Computer People."

Easy to think, "well, everyone knows those" and be wrong.

So when I need to write documentation for a novice home user, one who may not have any significant computer experience, I pretend I'm writing for my mother. Writing for an experienced audience, such as system administrators, is more challenging; if I know a certain term, shouldn't they? That isn't a safe rule of thumb. At the same time, there's a need to balance the benefits of defining a term (just in case) against the risk of losing your audience by writing down to them.

And the pitfalls multiply as the sophistication of your audience increases. Writing for system engineers, architects, developers...more and more you have to rely on your subject matter expert to point out that you may not know that word but your audience does.

Documentation should clearly state its intended audience so readers can gauge their ability to grasp it. Writers should have a thorough and accurate understanding of their audience. And writers must somehow learn technology while retaining a technical innocence so they can be in the reader's mindset as much as in their own.