How to improve your technical writing? Get feedback.
How do you know whether you are writing well? There’s only one test that really matters: when your audience understands your information and is moved to act in accordance with your goals.
But how will you know when this happens? The odds are pretty good that, early in your career anyway, you won’t have any automatic indicators. Sometimes you will be writing a decision paper, and your decision will be adopted as the company line, and this is a good self-test. But this won’t happen often; more often than not early in your career your writing will not be directly acted upon. Usually you’re going to have to solicit feedback.
You need bad news
That’s right, you’re going to have to open yourself up to receive, listen to, and learn from, feedback.
Cling to anyone who will give you honest feedback and constructive criticism. These people will make it possible for you to refine yourself into a polished professional. Do you think that you are already so good that you don’t need criticism? Think about Caruso, probably the greatest tenor in history, who at the height of his career as the star of the Metropolitan Opera conscientiously took voice lessons to improve his singing and acting on stage. If you are a better technologist than Caruso was a singer, maybe you don’t need criticism. Otherwise seek it out and treasure it.
Finding feedback that helps
How do you get feedback? There are some obvious choices. Your teammates can be a good source of feedback on the quality of the technical information you are presenting, but they are probably not the best indicator of how effectively you are communicating if they are already familiar with your topic.
Your boss, or his boss, can be good sources of useful feedback, as they probably understand less of the technical details and will be able to tell you whether you’ve effectively explained them.
Note, however, that here you might run into IAS (Ignorance Avoidance Syndrome). I have experienced a variety of bosses who perceived it a sign of weakness if anyone ever caught on that they didn’t know every detail of everything everywhere all the time. This is, of course, ridiculous, but if you have one of these bosses you won’t be able to take his feedback without doing some more work first. You’ll have to probe further. Have a casual conversation about this or that aspect of the content of your paper. Test whether he really did understand. Then act on what you find.
You can also turn to your family or significant other to review your work. My mom is smart and very capable, but she doesn’t know much about my field. Early in my career I sometimes tested things I’d written for lay audiences on her. I figured that if I wrote something about high performance computing that my mom could understand, I’d be good to go. Another excellent way to get feedback and constructive criticism is to publish in your community.
Dealing with it after you get it
When you go looking for feedback it can be very bracing to find it. You are effectively going after a list of things you aren’t doing well so you can fix them. Bad news about yourself can be hard to take.
For example if you try to publish in journals and at conferences in your field, be prepared. Because the reviewers read such a wide range and large volume of work, they often have little time or patience for work they feel isn’t “worth the effort.” Sometimes they are right. But sometimes they are just letting their personal disregard for an otherwise meaningful and exciting topic color their judgment of the quality of your work. Try to discern the difference before you let the crushing weight of their disdain forever discourage you from writing again. You can always do what I do: put a bad review away, and read it again in a month. Then decide what to do.
One of my mentors had an interesting story that he used to cheer me after a particularly scathing reviewer had really let me have it. He was well-published, even when he was a student. During his PhD work he and his advisor submitted a paper to a journal. Their writing received scathing reviews from all three reviewers. They put the paper and reviews in a pile and forgot the whole thing. A year later, one of them found and resubmitted the work, unedited, to the same journal. It received excellent reviews and was published without any substantial changes.
Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose.
