The Answer Depends on Whom You Ask

On February 14 and 15, some of us learned a lot about technical communication from a fictional space alien, a carton of Oreos, and five hundred kids. The Tech-Fest Refresher Course in Technical Communication was a rechcomm worshop that showcased at least five cardinal rules to follow when writing procedures.

The task: write a set of procedures telling someone (specifically a space alien named Al) how to eat an Oreo. The response: dozens of kid-written procedures that illustrate some basic technical writing principles.

1. Know your audience.
   The kids never forgot they were talking to aliens. Look at this example:

   You bring the tentacle with the Oreo to your mouth. Put the Oreo in your mouth and collide your top and bottom row of teeth to crush the Oreo…
   Then put it in your mouth. Your mouth is located under your three eyes and above your chin..

2. Help your readers get work done.
   The would-be tech writers made sure their procedures provided instructions for managers as well as workers, as in this example:

   Take a cookie, show it to them…split it in half, eat one half, give the other to them, and tell them that they must work for you to pay for the cookie.

3. Describe the choices that are available.
   Our young Tech-Fest attendees knew that It’s always important to give readers alternatives, as they did in this example:

   1. Open cookie up.
   2. Hold the cookie in your hand.
   3. Lick icing off both halves.
   4. Put cookie halves back together.
   5. Eat the cookie (chew and swallow.)
       or
   1. Stick the whole thing in your mouth.
   2. Chew.
   3. Swallow.

4. Provide details that a novice might not know.
   Techcomm professionals write procedures that help newbies perform their tasks like experts. The kids who visited our exhibit did the same thing:
   

   1. Hold the cookie next to your mouth.
   2.Take a bite from your cookie.
   3. Wipe your mouth with a napkin.
   4.Finish eating your cookie with your mouth and teeth. (Don’t forget to swallow.)

5. Don’t make assumptions.
   Many of the TechFest procedures accounted for the fact that their alien readers might not know things that were obvious to non-aliens. For example:

   You are supposed to eat cookie and not step on cookie…

Working technical communicators might do well to write procedures with these principles in mind.