Notes from 54th International STC Conference
Minneapolis, Minnesota, May 13-16, 2007

If You're So Smart, Why Does Your Writing Suck?

Karen A. Schriver

The presenter is with KSA Communication Design and Research.

Session Description: Subject-matter experts often have trouble writing for general audiences. It may be easy to attribute the problem to arrogance and cluelessness, but this interpretation is too simple. Research into the cognition of expertise offers insight into why SMEs have trouble transforming their knowledge for audiences. The presenter discussed domain experts writing for smart people outside of their field and presented ideas for working with people who may believe that clear visual and verbal language waters down their thinking.

• Technical communicators work across a broad spectrum of content domains. We must translate from highly technical language into writing that is comprehensible to a general audience.
• TCs edit, rewrite, and redesign material from SMEs and then deploy it via various media.
• An important part of the process is the "knowledge harvesting" – the front-end interviews with SMEs.
• Significant barriers exist that can impede the front-end communication. Some of them can be better understood – and overcome – by studying the nature of expertise (and why it sometimes correlates with poor writing.
• Overview
   
• What makes for bad writing? Causes vary.
• Why do smart people often find writing so difficult? (They may also be challenged with oral and visual communication.)
• What are the implications of these communication challenges? (For us as technical communicators).


• Bad writing is often based on inconsiderate content, shaped around the "wrong" interests, and driven by poor thinking (problems of commission and problems of omission)
• Problems of commission are easier to identify and fix than problems of omission (steps left out, incomplete explanation, absence of transitions, missing illustration, etc.)
• Bad process: Micromanaged by SMEs without a clue, created under impossible constraints, poor management and/or focus.
• Standard usage: bad grammar, punctuation, spelling.
• Expression: inappropriate framing, tone, style, diction
• Organization: weak structure, paragraphing, coherence
• Content: incomprehensible, inaccurate, missing, misleading, unusable
• Organization and content errors are usually the worst culprits with poor-writing SMEs... and also the areas that need the most attention from TCs.
• Ethos and error: impact of poor writing. Beason carried out a qualitative study of 14 people in business. A questionnaire and interview explored how professionals respond to ethos and error. Beason was interested in finding out what professionals find bothersome.
• Bad documents convey the impression of the authors being hasty, uninformed, careless; faulty thinking; negative ambassador for organization or company
• Schriver studied 297 teenagers' response to "Just Say No to Drugs" pamphlets. Students understood the brochure at a 90% level but they still wouldn't "just say no." The students imagined the writer as a "weird white person, thinking he/she was cool"; the stance as corny, unrealistic, and insulting; and implied an attitude that the readers were dumb (patronizing).
• Problems of structure: topic-oriented writing.
• Two styles of shaping content: knowledge telling vs. knowledge transforming
• Telling: temporal order, fact corpus, data dump, excessively detailed, "listy" progressions, topic shifts without previews
• Transforming: audience-centered order, facts fit rhetorical genre, audience-sensitive data, detail fits audience needs, structurally cued lists, well-marked transitions, previews of topics with graphic reinforcement.
• Some SMEs view writers as glorified secretaries, and they resist transforming because it "changes their technical content."
• Moving from telling to transforming calls for reframing personal knowledge (requires sensitivity to audience, situation, and culture), and making textual and/or graphic choices.
• Experts may tend to overestimate readers' vocabulary, be prone to "knowledge telling," pay too much attention to seductive details, and see connections among ideas that are not there.
• Chapter and section titles need to clearly reflect the content therein.
• Oregon has passed a Plain Language Bill to "defog" the legalistic language of legislation.
• "Greatness is hidden behind crap." – Schriver, 2007.
• SMEs tend to focus on features (product- and technology-centered) rather than benefits (audience- and user-centered). TCs would change the focus and probably also repackage (table or cherry box rather than text).
• Inconsiderateness: topical rather than procedural organization, and other structural/content elements that focus on the inherent nature of the technology rather than the benefits to the user.
• Experts tend to have trouble talking to people outside their domain, recognizing they may have a problem, and getting over assumptions about language.
• One author insisted on a complex decimal organization, pagination by section, and other such vestiges of old-school engineering – ignoring the options provided by styles, indexing, etc., that provide findability and trackability.
• Many publishers no longer provide quality in-house editing; much of this responsibility has been relegated to SME authors – many of whom are ill-equipped to handle it.
• Contexts that shape patterns of expert communication
   
• Social within their domain
• The culture of their domain: domain-specific ways of talking, acting, seeing the world; inside perspective


• Harvard Educational Review: Academic "gobbledy-gook": Hence our adoption of Omi and Winant's (1994) of "racial formation" – seeing race as "a matter of both social structure and cultural representation" – and our inclusion of the term "racialized" to emphasize the historicity of the discursive formation.
• Characteristics of experts
   
• Expert knowledge is organized as schemas, and knowledge structures are organized around typical situations or problems in domain
• Experts possess deep tacit knowledge of their domain that can make articulation difficult; the application of the knowledge becomes "automatized."
• Organization of knowledge may make it hard to access the "right stuff" at the "right level."


• Characteristics of experts writing for novices
   
• Experts tend to overestimate the audiences' knowledge of topic and subject matter, point of view, and vocabulary.
• The phenomenon: the "knowledge effect" (deep knowledge can actually block the ability to convey that knowledge to novices, due to egocentric projection that assumes since you know it, everyone does)
• Communicators are blinded by their expert knowledge


• Knowledge effect of vocabulary. Twenty Carnegie Mellon University undergraduate students identified their familiarity with a set of 65 low-frequency words and judged whether freshman or graduate CMU students would know the words.
• Conclusion: The better you know the word, the more likely you are to overpredict how many others will know the word.
• Domain experts who are also excellent writers
   
• Are able to model the reader
• See themselves as clarifying rather than simplifying
• Recognize when word choices or rhetorical models are inappropriate
• Are able to shorten lengthy text and retain meaning
• Compose flexibly across genre and purpose


• Implications for research; we don't really know how SMEs who write well can do so. Knowing how might help us train other SMEs to write better.
• Implications for teams
   
• Knowledge effect may lead individuals to become insensitive to readers' needs over time
• Team members may assume readers know more than they actually do
• Rotation of assignments may be useful
• Signoffs and approvals need fresh eyes
• Usability testing is essential.


• Summary
   
• Writing guided by the knowledge effect invites negative constructions of persona
• Poor writing/design is often a product of distributed expertise (understanding expertise can help organizations get around knowledge effects)
• Experts who reach a wider audience learn to appreciate good writing and design