Failure to communicate?

Failure to communicate - The Boston Globe

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This article on the poor writing skills of younger people these days is subtitled " The inability of many students to write clear, cogent sentences has costly implications for the digital age." Unfortunately, it really doesn't go into what those costs are. It focuses on the shortage of English teachers and the lack of instruction in writing in our schools. I wish it had focused more on what it means that "Johnny can't write." Does the inability to write a coherent English sentence mean that Johnny can't communicate?

There's so much more to communication than grammar skills and paragraph construction. Good communication also involves listening, organizing, critical thinking, expressive abilities, and maybe even empathy. The mechanics of grammar and writing are the tools we use to put all of those skills and qualities together. Unfortunately we don't do any better with teaching thinking or listening than we do with grammar.

Two college students are sitting at a nearby table in the coffee shop where I'm writing this. One is working on one last paper he needs to hand in. The other offers to help edit. She reminds him how important it is to have correct grammar. I jump into the conversation, explaining that I'm trying to write about "why Johnny can't write" and what this means. They enthusiastically inform me about how reliance on spellcheckers and the MS grammar checker prevents them from learning to write and how they are were not taught to think critically in high school. They both tell me that the ability to communicate clearly and think critically is essential for a functioning democracy. Wow! I couldn't have expressed it better myself.

They are about to leave. The young woman offers me her copy of Lives on the Boundary by Mike Rose. It's a classic on education and the underprepared, focusing on those who have trouble reading and writing in our schools and workplaces. I'm looking forward to reading it.

The two students have left. There's only one other customer in the place. He's reading a newspaper: the printed kind. I have a lot more reading and thinking to do before I will be truly able to write thoughtfully about the state of literacy and its implications for then workplace.

Stay tuned.

English is impossible or is it translation that is impossible?

This isn't exactly a technical writing issue unless you're writing about striped bass. However, I've meant to blog about it for awhile anyway. Here in the Merrimack Valley, the word schoolie refers to young, small, striped bass. It can also mean young fish in general. In the rest of the world, or so I thought, schoolie apparently means students in their last year of school (school leavers) or students in general.

I first discovered that schoolies doesn't necessarily mean fish when I was trying to find an article about a UMass scientist who tagged schoolies in Plum Island Sound a couple of years back. Naturally I googled schoolies. All the hits on the first page referred to Australian students -- not a single reference to stripers. Once I did find the research I was looking for, I got to wondering how on earth that research could ever be translated either by google translate or even by human technical translators. I imagine there are scientists in China wondering why on earth somebody in Massachusetts is tagging Australian students and for that matter what Australian students are doing in Plum Island Sound. OK, so context counts for a lot.

My point is that much translation does not take context into account. It's not just English either. I remember reading a French language web site about snowy owls (they nest in Quebec) that said: "Les juvéniles sont uniformément bruns, avec des restes de duvet blanc éparpillés." Google translated that as "The youthful ones are uniformly brown, with scattered remainders of white sleeping bag." Though I had fun fun picturing baby owls in sleeping bags up there in the frozen north of Quebec, I was pretty sure duvet meant down not sleeping bag. Then again we're back to the impossibility of English because down can mean a direction or fluffy feathers or a rolling upland. That's even leaving out football and depression. :-)

Back to schoolies in my digressive rambling style of today. My original thought was that schoolies as fish must be unique to the Merrimack Valley. Then I saw references to them all along the east coast of the US. OK, must be an east coast term. Then I got really confused when I found this UK news article from the Thurrock Gazette, which refers to fish. Evidently the difference is not geographic. The first dictionary that comes up when I try schoolie definition in google is www.freedictionary.com. Lo, and behold, the first meaning they list is young fish.

English is an impossible language in which to communicate, let alone translate. So, when writing about striped bass, I will continue to use the word schoolies. And I will write a more coherent entry about the pitfalls of context some other time.

competing trends?

A former co-worker tweeted this afternoon that Inc magazine did their article on teleworking without going into the office. That got me thinking. I've noticed recently that the media, both mainstream and the twitter/blog/social-sphere, have been paying way more attention to the "virtual office, distributed team, remote work, no more commute" trend than they have been to the trend toward Agile processes. Actually, I'd been thinking about it a bit since I heard a story on NPR a couple of weeks ago about telecommuting helping with work-life balance. When I looked up that article, I found tons of others. That confirmed my impression that this is a popular topic with the media.

On the other hand, I have not heard anything about Agile and Scrum (or is it SCRUM). Indeed a search for "agile scrum" on the NPR web site brought up nothing remotely related to software development. Yet Agile Scrum XP seems to be a much bigger trend in the actual software development world. Agile Scrum processes supposedly require physical co-location of all team members and daily face to face standup meetings. At one of my previous jobs it was absolutely forbidden to phone in to the daily standup (neither blizzard nor flood nor sick child was sufficient to merit using a telephone -- team members would simply notify the team they were not coming in). To reinforce this, the scrum area had no phone. The tech writer's role in an Agile team depends heavily on overhearing what the developers are talking about. You can't eavesdrop remotely. Additionally, we were working with another development team in China, who had their own scrum. Coordination was difficult.

I said "supposedly" above because I recently heard a talk by Julie LeMoine at Ignite Boston titled Virtual Work Spaces and Teams, which dealt with using avatars in Second Life to support distributed Agile teams. That might have helped with the China issue described above. I'm still not sure it would've helped with the eavesdropping issue though. I did ask about that afterwards, but did not have enough of a coherent discussion to resolve it.

So are these competing trends? It seems like Agile processes and telecommuting/work-life balance are mutually exclusive. Why aren't the trend-watchers noticing this and commenting on it?

Achieving Technical Writing Excellence

While searching for some parts to upgrade an old Mac G4 for my dendrologist friends, I came across the iFixit site. Although I didn't find the 3.5" IDE/ATA 120 Gb internal hard drive I need, I discovered a treasure trove of information for DIY troubleshooting and repair. The procedures are clear and well written gems of technical communication and the folks at iFixit are proud of it. The sidebar of the page I was looking at had a link to their latest blog post: Achieving Technical Writing Excellence.

My take-away from the blog post is that even in our brave new world of technical writing as type-driven topic-based content management, writers are achieving excellence using the oldest tech writing maxim in the book: writing for the reader. It was thrilling to read these words:
"You always have to be conscious of your audience, for they are the ones who will be gaining the most from your words. Write for them — not yourself."

Technical writing excellence is not about clever use of tools. It's about communicating the information that the user needs. It's about the user. It always will be.

Technical writers now recognized as distinct profession in Occupational Outlook Handbook

Note:  Things have changed since this was written. Technical Writer is still listed in the BLS Occupational Handbook, which is now located at https://www.bls.gov/ooh/media-and-communication/technical-writers.htm and STC ceased operations in 2025.

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I was heartened by the news that technical writer has been added to the 2010-11 edition of the Occupational Outlook Handbook (OOH). STC has worked hard for this. It is a strange, though, that this is finally happening at a time when a trend is starting to emerge in which technical writers are being switched to non-exempt status and being paid hourly rather than salary.

The emerging de-professionalization of tech writing is just a trickle right now and mostly going under the radar. Most companies are still looking for either permanent salaried technical communications workers or for temporary contract (1099 status) workers. However, a small number of job listings are now starting to be for full-time, permanent, hourly non-exempt tech writers at fairly low rates. I noticed one in particular that was offering $27 per hour for a senior tech writer with 7+ years of writing experience and developer-level technical skills.

I am starting to wonder if this is the tip of the iceberg and we are going to see software engineers becoming hourly workers as well. On the other hand, maybe this isn't a trend at all. Maybe it's just a few employers on each coast who are trying to cut costs. Time will tell.

Reading from the User's Point of View

As technical writers, we need to remember that the user is trying to get his or her job done. We need to see the task from the user's point of view.

Recently I was helping a friend troubleshoot some issues with the treatment management software used at the social service agency where she works. Staff members were having trouble with closing cases. They had been trained on the software when it was in Beta test but had no documentation beyond the training handout. Newer employees had not even seen the training handout. Fortunately, there were still a few copies of the handout around.

As soon as I sat down with the handout, I understood why the users were confused. Terminology was wildly inconsistent. It used the term button for command buttons, radio buttons, and sometimes tabs. Tab seemed to mean both the tab you clicked on and the screen it took you to. There were dependencies too. Some operations required that other operations be completed first but there was no indication of that in either the handout or the user interface.

The staff were asking "How do I close a case?" The handout presented the available options on each screen (or tab) followed by an exercise using them. Deep in one of the exercises, I found some clues. Turns out certain buttons did not appear unless you had completed another screen that was not necessarily actually required for the worker to close the case in real life. Using clues from the handout and some experimentation, we discovered that there was a simple workaround that allowed you to skip the unnecessary steps and still close the case. All that was needed was a short task-oriented procedure that told the workers how to do what they needed to do in the context of their agency's policies and practices.

Reading from the user's point of view turned out to be a valuable reminder of what it means to write for the reader.