This week’s reading response covers chapters 19 and 20 and is about writing technical instructions. The main focus in these chapters is tailoring your documents to your audience and their needs. This seems to be an emerging theme between all technical writing—audience analysis and context.
It makes sense because technical documents are always a means of one person sharing information with another. The most effective way to share this information depends on the context and the people involved. If the parties are a job seeker and employer, a resume and cover letter gives the employer the technical information he needs to make a decision to hire or not.
The same goes for any type of knowledge sharing. These chapters focus on an “expert”, in this case us, writing instructions or procedures for somebody with ranging levels of expertise on how to perform a task or show how something works. The most difficult part of this task occurs when you need to be able to tailor your document to different levels of the audience. For example, if I were to write a technical document with instructions for correcting a problem in the windows registry, a home user would have no idea where to begin if I told them to navigate to “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet” in the registry to fix the error message. They would need detailed step by step instructions with graphics to show them they are in the right place.
Also important to note from this chapter is the ethics of writing professional instructions. In many cases, if warning labels aren’t supplied and somebody gets hurt following your instructions, you could be liable. For example, over the phone at my job we tried to explain to a user how to remove a stick of RAM from his machine and replace it, but we didn’t warn him that static electricity could zap his motherboard or any other component. Luckily, even though a static shock did happen, nothing was destroyed, but we could have been liable for not warning him.
Know your audience.
I agree with you when you say that audience analysis is one of the main factors to technical writing. It is also very important to tailor your writing to who it most likely will concern. You wouldn’t want to be general and leave out a lot of details if the person you were trying to instruct was someone who had little or no experience on the subject at hand. An example of this problem is exactly what you put in your reading response when you talk about a windows error. I am fairly good with computers but I don’t really understand what you said when you tried to tell people how to do it. That is why we as technical writers need to include every bit of detail it takes to explain things that most people wouldn’t know how to do.
Audience & Details
I agree completely; figuring out who your audience is has to be your first concern when writing these technical descriptions and/or instructions. And details are definitely important, particularly when you're working with a beginner and addressing errors. I've found that one way to approach writing these things and not leaving out details is to think like you're training someone to do a job with your document. You're going to leave this behind for them so that they can handle anything that might happen. Writing with this thought in mind has always helped me try to come up with the details I need to include in instructions that I might otherwise forget.
Kristin
Technical documents
You surprised me with your mention of a resume and cover letter being used as sort of technical instructions to an employer. I was kind of only thinking of the instructions I have had to follow putting products together that have just frustrated me. I think you brough up a good point that the cover letter is a sort of step by step introduction of the job seeker.
All about the reader
Figuring out the type of reader and the reason that they are reading your instructions is one of the most important things to keep in mind when creating them. If you are creating instructions to put together a nuclear reactor you will know that the people who will be reading your instructions will be mechanically inclined and have some experience in the field. But, if you are putting together a desk or dresser you will have no clue how much experience the reader will have, so you will have to make your instructions go through every detail of the installation and explain them in detail. Knowing who you will be writing for can help a lot when making good instructions.
Testing
You bring up a good point about liability with you work experience. If something breaks while an “expert” is telling them what to do, I can’t imagine them not placing blame on the company. I think this is also a good reason for usability test. Hopefully you can perform numerous tests on different audiences and find out what mistakes they make. Not only will this save the company from a lawsuit, but it will also keep the customer happy, which is goal with customer service. Unfortunately you will never be able to see all the problems regardless of the amount of user tests, it really is something you need to budget for.