The platinum rule of writing

The act of writing is fundamentally the act of communicating information to someone else. This sounds simple enough, right?

Here’s a challenge: pick up a technical article in your field. Or, even better, pick up one in a field you don’t know much about. What do you see? Does the author organize his material in an easy-to-follow, logical progression from background through the advancement being discussed and then explain the ramifications? Or doe she assume you know all the details and jargon of delay-tolerant packet routing protocols and jump right into the details of RFC 1934? Are the sentences grammatically correct, relatively easy to read, and written with standard vocabularies? Or do you get lost in sentences that are a paragraph long? Is she so impressed with her own vocabulary of 5 and 6-syllable words that you feel sure she is writing only to convince you she’s smart?

The platinum rule of the written word is that you aren’t writing for you, you are writing to communicate with the reader. Act accordingly.

Writing in technology—outside of the consumer-level press designed specifically for my mom, generals, CEOs, and eighth graders—is riddled with jargon, complex sentence construction, and words seemingly selected only to amuse budding dictionary writers. Why? People who write this way are writing solely to convince other people that they are smart, whether they realize it or not. They are not writing for clarity, to share their ideas with others, or to advance technology. They are not writing to communicate.

How many times have you read something that was too complex to decipher? You might think that person is smart, but you probably wouldn’t turn to her for help in a pinch. At the gut level, you might be too intimidated to approach him for fear of looking stupid. At a more sophisticated level you might be concerned that you wouldn’t understand the explanation and so asking him would be a waste of time anyway.

Now think about the people and places you do go regularly for help, for example, a particular Web site on network configuration or rational drug design. I’m willing to bet that the reason you turn to this resource is that its information is concise, clear, and easy to understand, even when the topic is complex. This is one reason that discussion forums and the “Dummies” books are so popular. In both cases, information is presented for consumption by regular people. There is no jargon (at least not without definitions), and no complex and fancy grammatical structures to hide meaning. What is there is a single-minded focus on communicating information.

Write to communicate with your reader.