The subject may be unfamiliar, but that is not the only cause of discomfort. Readers are on the rack as they hang on grimly through interminable sentences such as:

They are irritated by the pomposity of:
…requires the daily maintenance of a satisfactory care regimen.
They are repelled by the windy self-importance of:
The associated benefits of rapid patient accommodation and extended wear times with minimal overwear syndrome are also superior to hard lens experience.

These features make reading the passage seem like wading through a quagmire. The feeling is depressingly familiar; but the passage is neither unusual nor untypical. Text-books, journal articles, reports and memoranda too often have the same uninviting style, the same indigestible content. Yet such passages can be written in another way, making them easier to read and therefore more communicative:

The difference between these two passages lies in the way language is used, since the technical content is the same in both. They show that it is possible to make the reader’s task easier, by using different writing tactics.

III. Causes for Poor Reading:

Why is so much technical writing so difficult to read? If we are to improve writing, it is worth spending time diagnosing the sources of this all-too-familiar failure. The main blame for the poor quality of much technical writing probably lies with educators. The last time most writers were taught about writing was at school, but the ideas of style which the English teacher inculcated in poetry lessons had more to do with long words and roses than with using language to communicate information. Many engineers and scientists were left with the conviction that ‘English’ was not for them. When they chose their careers, they thankfully gave up English for the clearer and more precise worlds of physics and chemistry. And the distaste for ‘English’ often persists into adult professional life.

The legacy from school English lessons includes half-remembered advice about style; such rules as ‘never repeat the same word in a sentence’, or ‘long and unusual words are elegant and interesting’. These maxims are inappropriate to the task of communicating technical information. Yet because writing has not been thought about subsequently, they survive in writers’ subconscious minds and creep out unexpectedly. Bad teaching has a lot to answer for. We should review the rules of style learnt at school and re-think the whole process of communicating.

Another problem survives from education. Writing at school or college has a different audience and a different purpose from the writing of a professional scientist or engineer. During fulltime education, laboratory reports, essays or examination papers are written to be read by people who already know the information. The readers are concerned with assessment, and writing is a process of display; students aim to impress with their sophistication and knowledge. The natural tactics are to use as much information as possible, to embed it in sophisticated language with complex structures, and to use recondite (!) vocabulary. There is nothing wrong in these tactics; they are the inevitable result of a system where learning and assessment go hand-in-hand. But the result of having no other training in writing is that most students emerge from full-time education with a writing style designed to impress rather than to communicate.

In professional life, the aim and audience for writing are different. For the first time, the new professional scientist or engineer is writing for people who do not know the information. The readers do not want to assess, they want to learn and use information for their own purposes. But usually no-one warns young writers that their tactics must change. What is needed is simplicity, not sophistication; the minimum, not the maximum of information is best. Most writers carry on writing in the way that brought rewards before, and this seems to us a major reason why so much professional writing is less effective than it could be.

IV. Authority and Tradition:

Technical writing is often poor because writers are frequently not given a clear enough brief for the job. Asked to ‘write a report on production’, they may not be told for whom, why, and for what purpose. Is the report for technical staff, or line management? Is it for record purposes, or for some important board-level decision? How much detail is going to be needed? What facts are important? All these questions will affect the tactics adopted in writing the report. Without this information, only an approximate and confusing report can be written. Vague and inadequate specifications invite poor reports.

Some writers feel that the manager’s blue pencil is hanging over them. Over-editing is discouraging for writers, and makes them afraid that their careful judgements about content and tactics will be wasted. We often find writers discouraged about the finer skills of writing because they know their well thought- out choice of words will be butchered by hatchet-men higher up the hierarchy. It is suggested, that you discuss a synopsis with the person who commissioned the report, before drafting the full text. This will usually remove distrust and misunderstandings about aims. But when you, the writer, are in the Manager’s chair yourself, be aware of the effects of over-editing on your staff.

Another reason why writing is often poor is that scientists and engineers tend, when writing, to take cover in a familiar and ‘traditional’ style. It is odd to think of the scientific community doing anything because it is traditional, rather than for good reasons, yet when it comes to writing, it is often tradition and not reason that prevails. A modern scientist, describing the atomic structure of matter, might write:

Science was not always reported like this. The passage is, in fact, a ‘modernized’ version of a sentence from Isaac Newton. In the 17th century Newton wrote:

The ‘tradition’ of verbose writing is a modern one. It has been pilloried often enough, but many writers still turn to it. Newton did not feel the need to obfuscate his meaning with inflated style; the simple language of clear thinking was exciting enough without decoration. Too many modern scientists and engineers seem to need to wrap up their meanings. We presume they think it makes their writing more impressive; but every writer knows how depressingly easy to write—and how meaningless to read—such a verbose style is. Writing is often poor because of thoughtless use of a ‘traditional’ style.

A final reason for the poor quality of much scientific and technical documentation is that some writers do not want their style to be transparent, or their meaning easily understood.

A major psychological obstacle is fear of authority—of being fired, of not being promoted, of being disciplined, of displeasing a supervisor.3

When presenting the case for clear and simple expression to seminar groups on writing in industry, we are frequently surprised at the resistance. Outspoken members of the seminar often say that clear writing lets the manager see just where things went wrong, and what mistakes were made. Wrap it up in flowery language, and managers will not notice the defects of the work. This argument is a sad underestimate of the quality and intelligence of those who have been promoted, and is a sign of a depressing lack of professionalism.

Such an attitude is not confined to engineers and scientists. In many other spheres, language is used for protection rather than for communication. Complex slang which confuses the outsider is one example. Cockneys talking in rhyming slang use language to identify themselves in their group, and to confuse outsiders. Language can be a wall as well as a window, and scientists and engineers sometimes use it in this way. An industrial relations manager graphically expressed it:

Specialists like to hold information to them like a hot water bottle.4

Wrong attitudes, then, as much as poor skills are at the root of much of the indigestible writing from which we all suffer. Misunderstanding of the importance of communication, lack of confidence in the use of the language code, half-remembered and misdirected education, discouragement from managers, protectiveness in the face of probing readers—all these result in thoughtless adoption of a traditional, verbose and long-winded style. Traditional attitudes and tactics must be rethought because they are inefficient. They waste time and energy for the reader, and in the modern world the reader has less and less time and energy to waste. As Magnus Pyke wrote:

V. Conclusion:

We can conclude this discussion of what communication is, and why it often goes wrong, with the answer that scientific and technical writing often fails because writers do not think enough about their real purposes, about whom they are writing for, and about the nature of the code they are using. Remember, first, that you are trying to communicate information, not just to make information available on paper. To do this effectively, you must re-think many assumptions about writing.

References:

1. Johnston, Professor Edgeworth (1961), A Survey of Chemical Engineering Education and Practice Transactions of the Institution of Chemical Engineers, 39 (4), 263.
2. Newton, Sir Isaac, Optiks London (1704), quoted by Pyke, Magnus (1960) in: This Scientific Babel The Listener, LXIV (1641)(8th September), 380.
3. Gardner, B.B., Human Relations in Industry, Irwin, R.D., Chicago (1945) 131, quoted by Bram, V.A., in: The Efficiency of Forms and Styles of Information Exchange in Industrial and Research Organisations. Unpublished doctoral thesis, UWIST (September 1976), 45.
4. From interviews reported by Bram, V.A., see ref. [3], 41.
5. Pyke, Magnus (1960) This Scientific Babel. The Listener, LXIV (1641), 380.