The IEEE Guide to Writing in the Engineering and Technical Fields E-Book

David Kmiec

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Serie: IEEE PCS Professional Engineering Communication Series
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 391

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

Helps both engineers and students improve their writing skills by learning to analyze target audience, tone, and purpose in order to effectively write technical documents This book introduces students and practicing engineers to all the components of writing in the workplace. It teaches readers how considerations of audience and purpose govern the structure of their documents within particular work settings. The IEEE Guide to Writing in the Engineering and Technical Fields is broken up into two sections: "Writing in Engineering Organizations" and "What Can You Do With Writing?" The first section helps readers approach their writing in a logical and persuasive way as well as analyze their purpose for writing. The second section demonstrates how to distinguish rhetorical situations and the generic forms to inform, train, persuade, and collaborate. The emergence of the global workplace has brought with it an increasingly important role for effective technical communication. Engineers more often need to work in cross-functional teams with people in different disciplines, in different countries, and in different parts of the world. Engineers must know how to communicate in a rapidly evolving global environment, as both practitioners of global English and developers of technical documents. Effective communication is critical in these settings. The IEEE Guide to Writing in the Engineering and Technical Fields * Addresses the increasing demand for technical writing courses geared toward engineers * Allows readers to perfect their writing skills in order to present knowledge and ideas to clients, government, and general public * Covers topics most important to the working engineer, and includes sample documents * Includes a companion website that offers engineering documents based on real projects The IEEE Guide to Engineering Communication is a handbook developed specifically for engineers and engineering students. Using an argumentation framework, the handbook presents information about forms of engineering communication in a clear and accessible format. This book introduces both forms that are characteristic of the engineering workplace and principles of logic and rhetoric that underlie these forms. As a result, students and practicing engineers can improve their writing in any situation they encounter, because they can use these principles to analyze audience, purpose, tone, and form.

Leseprobe

Copyright © 2017 by The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.Published simultaneously in Canada.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN: 978-1-111-907013-9

Contents

A Note from the Series Editor

About the Authors

1 A Technique for Writing Like a Professional

Introduction

1 The Social Situation of Text

The Social Contexts for Technical Writing

Models of the Writing Environment

This Guide’s Approach

References

2 Making Writing Decisions

Introduction

Document Structure and Granularity

Arranging Text at the Macro Level

Creating Effects with Lexis and Syntax at the Micro Level

Intermediate Structural Units and Argumentative Movement

Implications for the Process of Writing

Additional Reading

2 Writing Documents

2 Introduction

3 Writing to Know: Informative Documents

Introduction

The Purposes of Informative Documents

Occasions for Preparing an Informative Document

Audiences for an Informative Document

Key Communication Strategies When Writing to Know

Questions for Analyzing Existing Documents

Some Typical Informative Documents

References

4 Writing to Enable: Instructions and Guidance

Introduction

The Purposes of Enabling Documents

Occasions for Preparing an Enabling Document

Audiences for an Enabling Document

Key Communication Strategies When Writing to Enable

Questions for Analyzing Existing Documents

Characteristic Enabling Documents

5 Writing to Convince: Persuasive Documents

Introduction

The Purposes of Persuasive Documents

Occasions for Preparing a Persuasive Document

Audiences for the Persuasive Document

Key Communication Strategies When Writing to Convince

Questions for Analyzing Existing Documents

Typical Examples of Persuasive Documents

6 Correspondence: Medium of Workplace Collaboration

Introduction

The Purposes of Correspondence

Occasions for Preparing Correspondence

Audiences for Correspondence

Key Communication Strategies When Corresponding

Characteristics of Correspondence Documents

Appendix: IEEE Style for References

Index

Books in the IEEE PCS PROFESSIONAL ENGINEERING COMMUNICATION SERIES

EULA

List of Illustrations

Figure 1.1 Claude Shannon’s “Schematic diagram of a general communication system” [1]. This diagram represents a transmission model of communication where the mathematical value of a communicative message is affected by decoding, transmission, environmental noise, and encoding.

Figure 1.2 Diagram of a client-oriented engineering project made using Mathes and Stevenson’s egocentric approach. This diagram models the different relationships various audiences have with a document produced for a client. Different kinds of pressure may affect the message different ways.

Figure 1.3 Example of audience groups positioned in two dimensions. This chart represents categories of readers as they might be evaluated based on their technical knowledge and organizational distance.

Figure 1.4 Example representation of how audience groups might be connected to document sections and word choice. Writing decisions can be tied directly to considerations of audience.

Figure 4.1 Instructions are often indented with a gutter between the step number and the text of the step. The gutter, an uninterrupted vertical white space, helps the reader find where steps begin and end.

List of Tables

Table 2.1

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

A Note from the Series Editor

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e1

A Note from the Series Editor

With this book, The IEEE Guide to Writing in the Engineering and Technical Fields, the IEEE Professional Communication Society (PCS) continues its work to help engineers, technical professionals, scientists, researchers, teachers, and students alike make their work easier, more clear, and better targeted for dispersing information. Wiley-IEEE Press and the PCS are proud to add this guide to our book series titled Professional Engineering Communication. This guide, authored by David Kmiec and Bernadette Longo, is a wonderful entry point into reconsidering the technical message, the shape it will take, the readership it will inform, and the mechanical prowess to make it professional. Readers will not only find here some basics about mechanics and purpose, but also come to understand the deeper considerations for writing certain types of technical documents and how to achieve their purpose.

The authors bring their considerable experience in guiding technical professionals, engineering practitioners, and even students to this volume. Even a quick perusal of this volume will realign your purpose, tone, and outcomes when diligently applied.

The series has a mandate to explore areas of communication practices and application as applied to the engineering, technical, and scientific professions. Including the realms of business, governmental agencies, academia, and other areas, this series has and will continue to develop perspectives about the state of communication issues and potential solutions when at all possible.

While theory has its place (in this book and this series), we always look to be a source where recommendations for action and activity can be found. All of the books in the fast-growing PEC series keep a steady eye on the applicable while acknowledging the contributions that analysis, research, and theory can provide to these efforts. There is a strong commitment from the Professional Communication Society of IEEE and Wiley to produce a set of information and resources that can be carried directly into engineering firms, technology organizations, and academia alike.

For the series, we build on this philosophy: at the core of engineering, science, and technical work is problem solving and discovery. These tasks require, at all levels, talented and agile communication practices. We need to effectively gather, vet, analyze, synthesize, control, and produce communication pieces in order for any meaningful work to get done. This book, like others in the series before it, contributes to that vision.

Traci Nathans-Kelly, Ph.D.

About the Authors

Dave Kmiec coordinates undergraduate technical writing for the Department of Humanities at New Jersey Institute of Technology. He also consults for government agencies and engineering services and manufacturing firms, which he helps them establish knowledge management practices and effective workflows for digital and print publications. Dr. Kmiec earned his Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Technical Communication from University of Minnesota, where his research focused on engineering communication and the cultural history of engineering as a profession. He also holds an M.S. in Technical Writing from North Carolina State University and B.A. degrees in Chemistry and English.

Bernadette Longo is an Associate Professor in the Department of Humanities at New Jersey Institute of Technology. She is the author of Edmund Berkeley and the Social Responsibility of Computer Professionals (ACM Books/Morgan & Claypool, 2015) and Spurious Coin: A History of Science, Management, and Technical Writing (State University of New York Press, 2000), as well as numerous articles and conference papers in the field of technical and professional communication. Dr. Longo earned her Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Technical Communication from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1996.

1A Technique for Writing Like a Professional

Introduction

What does it mean to write like an engineer? How does writing like a technical professional in a workplace differ from other kinds of writing you may do? Looking at a few examples of the writing tasks that engineers and technical professionals face can help illustrate what the authors of this handbook mean by writing on the job:

A mechanical engineer is asked to research possible material options for a new fastener. She prepares a memo for her manager that presents the options, as well as provides information about the suppliers of each material. As part of the memo, she recommends the best material option based on specific design parameters.

A software engineer documents his work on a feature change in a software application. The documentation is recorded in an online system that allows other members of the development team to review the feature change and add their own comments.

A biomedical engineer working on an implantable shoulder joint prepares a series of documents that will allow his company to apply for federal approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) so his company can test the device in humans.

A computational biologist reviews a research article submitted for publication in a well-respected science journal. As part of her review, she must ensure that the work submitted is original, appropriately documented, and written using terms customary for professionals in the field.

In its simplest terms, writing like an engineer or a technical professional means conveying specialized information that helps people adopt and implement technologies for practical purposes. However, writing in this way does more than help people use technologies. You are also persuading others to adopt your viewpoint on technology. For example, the mechanical engineer recommends one material choice above other options. Her recommendation is based on her research and her evaluation of the options based on design parameters such as cost, sustainability, availability, and time to delivery. Likewise, the biomedical engineer must follow the strict protocols associated with device review and approval, since an implantable device like a shoulder joint must not injure the patient. These communications are, therefore, as much about human relations as they are about technology.

Because all communication reflects human relations, many technical professionals acknowledge that writing is more than simply a neutral conduit to convey information from one person to another. Instead, engineers and technical professionals shape knowledge as it moves between the professional and a client or the end users of technology. In this sense, writing like an engineer or a technical professional means influencing the way that people understand the world around them.

Working engineers and technical professionals understand the importance of writing in their professional lives. Many of them learn how to be effective writers on the job, usually under the mentorship of a more senior colleague, such as an engineering manager or team leader. The purpose of this book and its accompanying website is to provide insight into writing in engineering and technical professions for both students and working professionals. The sections of this book will give you strategies for writing that are based on understanding the work contexts in which writing functions.

Written documents like the examples listed above are not isolated works; they exist in a network of interpersonal and organizational contexts. On an interpersonal level, a writer works within existing relationships with other people in the organization, such as supervisors, co-workers, and people in other departments. On an organizational level, this writer is part of a department or unit that functions in conjunction with other departments. For example, the software developer in the earlier example might be part of a team that is working on a larger project within an organization. They might be working on a control system for a piece of equipment and need to communicate with people in other departments, like the legal or marketing departments, working together as an interdisciplinary team.

In addition to internal contexts, a writer works within a social context that extends beyond the walls of the organization. The work an individual engineer or technical professional does on the job is often shared among other people in a discipline, profession, or industry. The work you do may need to be reported to a government regulatory agency. You might even find that your work is scrutinized by a citizen watchdog group. You will probably find that you are preparing documents for a wide circle of potential readers.

To be immediately effective, the documentation that the software engineer prepares in the example above has to be composed in such a way that his peers can understand it and comment on it. But to be effective in the lifecycle of the project, the document may also need to be written so it can be included in a record of changes made to that version of the product or incorporated into a report on work done for a client over a certain time period. For it to be effective beyond the life of the project, the software engineer may also need to make sure the information will be understandable to future programmers working on the next version of the software. He may consider how to communicate information about the project and product to an organization’s legal or marketing staffs, which will have particular guidelines to follow that emphasize specific information from the programmers.

In order to write effective documentation, this engineer had to understand some pragmatic considerations: how work gets done in his specific corporate environment, what documents like the one he was preparing typically look like, how the project was scheduled to proceed. He also had to understand some social considerations: the expectations of a specific project manager and the specific team of engineers who would read and comment on his work, how his documentation might be used in indirect ways to evaluate his work, how it might be used by future engineers to do new work, and how people in other departments needed to use his documentation to complete their work related to the project.

This book presents a technique for assessing the social situation of writing and then using that assessment to make writing decisions. To do this, we present a model of the social situation that you might use to generate justifications for certain textual patterns and we present a guide to the places in text where patterns are likely to be found and decisions are likely to be made. The first part of this book articulates this approach.

Chapter 1: The Social Situation of Text

. This chapter discusses models for understanding social environment in which communication functions. It also provides a hybrid model of the social environment, based on the rhetorical and pragmatic situation of text, that you can use to inform your decisions are you write.

Chapter 2: Making Writing Decisions

. This chapter discusses the writing process and the nature of text. By identifying the places where a writer has control over documents, arguments, and language, writing can be treated as an active decision-making process.

Then, in the second part, we introduce typical purposes for writing in organizations and discuss general forms of workplace documents. This section will help you more fully understand the sample workplace documents available in the online supplement to this handbook.

Chapter 3: Writing to Know: Informative Documents

. This chapter discusses common reporting forms and talks about the importance of drafting and deploying evidence-based arguments in documents like reports and logically arranging and attending to precise style techniques in documents like specifications.

Chapter 4: Writing to Enable: Instructions and Guidance

. This chapter discusses documents that instruct and enable readers to perform tasks or operate in the workplace and covers how to deploy action-based forms of text for policies, procedures, and training materials.

Chapter 5: Writing to Convince: Persuasive Documents

. This chapter discusses overtly persuasive documents and considers how understanding your readers’ existing beliefs and values enables you to prepare a persuasive proposal or business plan.

Chapter 6: Correspondence: Medium of Workplace Collaboration

. This chapter discusses mundane workplace communications like emails and describes how understanding workplace habits and goals and the work habits of others enable you to write quick and productive messages.

1The Social Situation of Text

This chapter details a method considering the social context of communication, the analysis which provides the information needed to make good writing decisions.

Several traditional models of writing contribute to the method expressed in this chapter:

Transmission model created by mathematician Claude Shannon at Bell Labs

Correctness model usually found in grammar books

Cognitive model of how people think based on behavioral psychology

Social/rhetorical model of communication as persuasion based on classical Greek and modern principles of social interaction

To understand the social situation of text, we suggest you consider:

The

rhetorical situation

of your communication.

What is your

purpose

for writing?

Who is your

audience

?

What is your

identity

as a professional?

What is the

context

that surrounds this communicative transaction?

The

pragmatic situation

of your communication.

What do you know about the

community

that surrounds you and your audience?

What are your

identity

and your audience members’ identities in that community?

Given this community, what

generic practices

exist that might resemble those you might use? What preexisting documents match your purpose, audience, and identity?

The Social Contexts for Technical Writing

Humans are social creatures, and communication is the means by which humans identify themselves and each other, express their needs and desires, share knowledge, and interact to achieve goals. Communication is a ubiquitous feature of human communities. It is the behavior that creates society and enables groups of people to organize and accomplish complex tasks. When working together on a task, humans in close proximity who need timely reactions from others use speech and gesture to get their message across. When humans are distributed, however, or when they need action to occur at some later time, or when tasks are complex enough that the in-the-moment nature of speech is not sufficiently organized to make work plannable or comprehensible, they write.

Writing is a visual form of communication. It relies on the manipulation of symbols into patterns and of patterns into units of written communication—texts—that are recognizable and accessible to someone in a shared language community. Writing relies on the literacy and attention of readers, who make their own meaning out of text as they read. Contemporary texts rely on visual cues as well as textual ones—layout, formatting, and design. The way texts are presented implies cultural messages about what things are important, relevant, or trustworthy to a community.

Workplace writing is often evaluated by whether or not it is functional—whether or not it can be used in the furtherance of some purpose. When a text is used in a workplace to enable someone to accomplish a task, the members of that workplace community, who share a goal and share expectations about what will help their firm reach that goal, consider that text functional. (Though we don’t say it as often, a text that makes it difficult for members of a community to reach a goal could be described as dysfunctional by those community members.) If the functionality of a text relies on the goals of community members and their ability to recognize common forms, terms, and practices, then knowledge of these goals, forms, and practices is the most reliable way to produce a functional text. Takeaway: Workplace writing is functional.

Because writing relies on a reader, and because both the reader and the author of text exist in a cultural context that relies on certain values and ideas, writing decisions are best made with a structured understanding of the social environment and how writing functions in it. We will use the word situation in this chapter and throughout this book to describe the social position of text. The term implies a position or location relative to other things, a relational way of understanding something. We mean to imply that text can only be understood relative to the social environment in which it exists and that writing, therefore, relies on understanding the social environment and recognizing how that understanding can help you plan and compose text. Takeaway: Writing decisions rely on social knowledge.

As a professional and a person, your sense of the customs of your workplace, of the practices of your expert community, and of interpersonal relationships and language patterns are likely more subconscious than conscious. That subconscious awareness is what we rely on when we write by ear—composing and rereading our own writing to check if it “sounds” right or “sounds” good. Even though we might not be able to articulate what we know about our social environment, this awareness is a relatively powerful tool. It enables us (some of us more than others) to imitate complex communication patterns with a reasonable degree of reliability and to generally prepare texts that people recognize.

However, when we are working at the edge of our social understanding, as happens when we enter new professional groups or work places or work with a new client whose values or goals we don’t yet understand or when we deal with a problem that is unorthodox or complex, this tacit way of sounding out social rules breaks down. This is also the time when our texts matter the most to shape the actions and thoughts of others.

To get beyond sounding out text, you must assess the social environment of text. This requires dividing the social environment into components, factors, or forces and considering how those elements inform the writing decisions you make. Then, you must be able to recognize the points in text where you have the opportunity to affect your reader. This chapter focuses on modeling the social situation. The next chapter focuses on some high-yield points of control in text.

Models of the Writing Environment

Because communication is a central factor in the organization of society and the accomplishment of shared goals, theories of communication exist in philosophical tradition of almost every culture. In the modern era, anthropologists, electrical engineers, architects, artists, biologists, and others have each used their disciplinary techniques and tools to discuss how humans communicate, convey, express, or share meaning. We believe that writing—that is, composing a text—is a process of recognizing the social and linguistic environment of that text and then making decisions about which words, structures, and arguments to deploy. A systematic approach for doing this is found in the latter half of this chapter. First, however, we will discuss the models that underlie that approach as an understanding of them will make you better able to consider and customize the advice in this book.

Transmission Models

In our everyday workplace environment, we often talk about writing as a transaction and, whether we realize it or not, use terms from a mathematical and communication engineering tradition. A worker encodes a message in writing and transmits it, and a recipient receives and decodes it. The recipient’s ability to understand that message is based on how accurately it was encoded or maybe on how well-tuned it was to match the wavelength the recipient is or on the keys the recipient has. Sometimes, the channel carrying the message is complex. If a message has to be relayed through a third party, like a project manager, then the fidelity of the signal may degrade as it is repeated.

Communication scholars and social scientists today tend to call this a transmission model of communication because it relies on the same terminology that is typically used to discuss electromagnetic signaling. When Claude Shannon, a researcher at Bell Laboratories, articulated this model in 1948, he called it a mathematical model and represented its basic structure with the box diagram shown in Figure 1.1 [1].

Figure 1.1 Claude Shannon’s “Schematic diagram of a general communication system” [1]. This diagram represents a transmission model of communication where the mathematical value of a communicative message is affected by decoding, transmission, environmental noise, and encoding.

Shannon developed this simple communication model to suggest how humans and computers could communicate and to indicate how probability could be used to mathematically describe the points at which that communication could break down. At the time, the goal was to translate human language into the binary mathematical language that machines used, so that they could work on natural language problems and then send back mathematical results that were translated back into human language. Takeaway: Shannon was modeling human–machine interaction.

Shannon’s model was just a starting point for a larger conversation about using probabilistic approaches to considering message entropy—the decay of the fidelity messages—and to considering how the constraints of natural language (that is, languages that were not designed but developed organically) could be leveraged to establish reliable human–machine interactions.

When taken as a model of human-to-human communication, the transmission model has some problems. Humans are not machines. And the model doesn’t account for human inconsistency or sources of misunderstanding, social disruptions to the model that are not reducible to signal concepts like noise or other fidelity problems. It doesn’t account for humans’ subtle and complex assignment of meaning to language. It doesn’t represent the larger relationship between the sender and receiver or give advice about how that relationship affects the channel or the messaging environment. It doesn’t directly take into account the persuasiveness of messages or how the credibility of a message is established. Takeaway: Humans are not machines.

The model’s failure to model human cognition and social behavior isn’t surprising; it wasn’t Shannon’s goal when he wrote the 1948 article. (In fact, quite early in the article, Shannon dismisses the notion of a message’s meaning as “irrelevant to the engineering problem”.)

In everyday practice, people communicate in unintended ways and even learn about their own intentions through communicating with another person. But, in a way, the vocabulary of the transmission model is hard to escape (sender, receiver, message, channel, background, noise, etc.) and the basic pattern of the model is generally descriptive of the way we often think of communication. Concepts like “fine tuning” a message or providing background information so that the reader (receiver) will “correctly” understand (with fidelity) an argument are easily expressible using this vocabulary and logic. And, as a baseline, this model is a useful framework for considering that there is an audience for communication and that the audience has a role in the communication process. (Though, that role may be better articulated via a social logic than via probability.) Takeaway: Transmission terms are foundational but limiting.

Correctness Models

Correctness models of writing assume that there is one best way to use language and that good writing is writing that matches certain universal criteria. Strong writers, as judged by a correctness model, are masters of the preexisting patterns that texts may take and of a number of idiosyncratic rules about which word should be used at which time. While writers are still responsible for making decisions, the choices they make are constrained by some external standard of what is correct. And their way of making decisions, especially when developing as writers, is to use reference guides or to solicit advice from authorities.

Many grammar and style books prepared with the correctness model in mind offer plenty of highly specific, prescriptive, and universal advice, based on an idea that certain patterns in English grammar are more pure, original, or attractive than others. Other guides, like those that index citation practices and make authoritative statements on punctuation and word usage, are less interested in purity and have been created out of a social decision that standardizing certain writing conventions within a field has some value. For example, the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (or APA) is a guide published by a professional society for those publishing in the behavioral and social sciences. The Chicago Manual of Style, on the other hand, is a guide originally published by a press itself. Both of these guides have evolved over time to become comprehensive authoritative guides to a generally correct form of writing. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) rules for formatting citations are included as an appendix to this handbook.

These resources have some value, as professional communities (and the members of the public and business communities they interact with) tend to rely heavily on patterns of grammar, style, and usage that appear in publications and in conversations across the language community. Correctness-based resources can be useful for choosing idiomatic or generally acceptable words and expressions, for choosing how and when to punctuate or paragraph, and even for choosing reliable starting places for formulaic documents. A correctness-based resource that is seen as authoritative in a specific environment is a baseline for writing effective documents. Takeaway: Correctness-based resources are useful starting points.

Corporate style guides and templates that help to enforce consistency of usage and format in documents across a distributed company are important to creating a brand image, which may be, on the whole, more valuable than the nuanced variation of a particular technical term or product name. A style guide written for use in your company may be an excellent resource for choosing which words to use or deciding how to organize a report. If others in your workplace follow the guide as well, it will make your documents look normal to those from that workplace.

Few corporate style guides, however, contain sufficient depth to address writing decisions that go beyond superficial concerns. A professional in a workplace situation armed with only the correctness model is often forced to extend that model to make rules about complex writing practices that correctness, as a concept, is ill-suited to handle. It’s one thing to devise rules for which terminology to use at which time. It’s quite another to develop elaborate and specific templates for sections of documents which need to be prepared to respond to dynamic situations or to develop standard patterns of sentences and paragraphs to use in writing to clients. In most situations, rules that are specific enough to be followed are too specific to be useful all the time, whereas rules that seem to describe every situation are too general to be usable to make specific decisions. Takeaway: Correctness has its limits.

While a correctness-based resource may help you to know how to write in a structural sense, it might not help you understand what to write in a meaningful sense. You could make a perfectly correct statement at an inopportune time, with inappropriate information, to someone who disagrees with you, or in other ways that would render your grammatically correct and consistently worded statement inappropriate or even harmful. As Gregory Shafer noted, “Language correctness, like reality itself, is contingent on context, audience, and power” [2], [3].

Cognitive/Behavioral Models

Cognitive models of writing explore how behavioral and cognitive psychology can be used to understand the production and reception of written communication. Researchers who espouse a cognitive model observe writers and users of texts, often in controlled environments, noting how they produce or navigate texts, where they hesitate or get confused, how they overcome problems, and what kinds of behaviors help them cope with the complex problems of reading and writing. Sometimes these researchers use brain scans or eye tracking, or ask users of websites to talk through their decision-making processes as they work. The goal of this research is to explain how humans communicate and, sometimes, to articulate how human communication (like writing) can be designed to best suit humans physiological and psychological needs.

Technical professionals who deal with product development, especially with software and interface design, may use techniques based on cognitive models to evaluate the usability of their products or interfaces. Usability, or the degree to which something can be easily used or learned to be used, can be measured by observing sample users who are trying to perform actions or can be evaluated by reasoning through the logics and tasks a user may want to perform. Takeaway: Some experts use measurements to assess humans’ ability to use texts.

Usability approaches and terms like effectiveness, efficiency, and ease of use can be applied to written products, like instructions or guidebooks, as well. Researchers who study instructional design and accessibility, for example, may time users completing each stage of a task or may use think-aloud protocols in which test subjects verbalized what was going on in their minds as they used instructions to complete a task. These approaches are designed to gather data for usability testing in product design and development. Web design and human–computer interaction expert Jakob Nielsen advocates this approach as “the single most valuable usability engineering method” because it “serves as a window on the soul, letting you discover what users really think about your design”[4].

Cognitive researchers and linguists who are interested in literacy have also studied what makes some texts or expressions seem easier to understand than others, a quality they call readability. The ability of readers to read and comprehend a text, and the rate at which they can read it, can be affected by a number of things including visual elements (like the style, size, and spacing of type) and linguistic ones (like the complexity of vocabulary and the length of sentences). Takeaway: Others measure readers’ mental ability to access, retain, and understand text.

The analysis of adult reading skills and of how reading relates to the complexity of texts was of interest to newspaper publishers and reading educators throughout the twentieth century. Depression-era social theorists like Douglas Waples, who were intensely concerned with who was reading and whether a poorly educated changing workforce had access to appropriate reading materials, began a decades-long debate about what made a text readable [5]. Using cognitive models, psychometricians and reading educators like William Gray, Rudolf Flesch, and Edgar Dale developed tests for assessing the readability of text so as to promote writing in “plain English” [6]–[8]. Writing handbooks, publishing software, corporate best practice guidelines, and reading and writing curricula are still sometimes prepared with the conclusions of readability research in mind.

The act of writing has been the subject of a cognitive research as well, and theorists who study composition often talk about the process that writers undertake or the way a writer’s brain is able to formulate and manage ideas and translate them into written expression. Cognitive models that focus on the writer help explain a writer’s thought process from a behavioral perspective by describing mental actions that a person takes when crafting a text. Takeaway: Many models for the text composing process rely on cognitive theories.

Linda Flower and John Hayes, for example, call composing a “distinctive thinking process” in which writers seek to achieve a hierarchy of goals [9]. Based on psychology and linguistics, their cognitive model represents the act of writing as a process with three major elements:

The task environment, which includes “things outside the writer’s skin, starting with the rhetorical problem … and eventually including the growing text itself.”

The writer’s long-term memory, which is where “the writer has stored knowledge, not only of the topic, but of the audience and of various writing plans.”

The writing processes of planning, translating, and reviewing, “which are under the control of a Monitor.” The monitor “functions as a writing strategist which determines when the writer moves from one process to the next.”

In this process model, writers go through stages of planning, translating, and reviewing not in a linear path, but in an iterative manner by repeatedly circling back through the stages.

Social/Rhetorical Models

Social models of writing assume that writers make choices based on their understanding of what is appropriate in their situation and within their community. Writing then becomes a strategic process; it requires a writer to parameterize the situation, to consider the values of the community, and to observe and reflect on existing examples of communication or on evidence of relationships and of community members’ personalities. The ability to articulate features of an audience or the social situation of text is necessary to consciously adopting a social approach to writing, and so researchers who articulate social models for communication are often interested in describing the communities in which (and the occasions when) communication take place.

Articulations of social models for communication can be found as far back as the dawn of writing and many scholars of social models today use these traditions as ways of considering current social practices and communication topics [10]. In particular, scholars who study rhetoric, or the effective or persuasive use of language, often relate contemporary observations about communication back to classical texts, Greek and Roman philosophical writings from the era when popular participation governance made educational discussions and theories of speech giving, persuasion, and linguistic arts practical. Rhetoric in these texts is often described an art or a skill of recognizing the features of the social environment and thereby arguments that can be made persuasively, and a knowledge of the forms language and argument may take. Takeaway: Social models of communication originate in many cultures and eras.

Classical rhetoricians like Aristotle and Cicero emphasized the importance of selecting arguments based on the specific audience being persuaded. They gave advice about what kinds of evidence might be useful to support different kinds of arguments. They discussed how to establish credibility. And they suggested procedures for preparing and organizing communication. At the same time, they were articulating a systematic way in which communication and persuasion worked in society.

Contemporary scholars in this tradition consider how texts are similar in superficial ways, how they are prepared and deployed within a community, or how they relate to community values or embody actions that enable communities to get things done. At the same time, they describe how texts can be produced by new community members, how one member of a group goes about convincing another member of an argument, and how professionals use communication to accomplish complex tasks.

Contemporary scholars like Karlyn Kohrs Campbell and Kathleen Hall Jamieson have suggested that social groups rely on the repetition of recognizable communicative acts in order to function and to establish group identity [11]. These regular acts, called genre, appear as texts that have customary uses, similar argumentative constructions, or common superficial linguistic features. Carolyn Miller has gone on to argue that people develop genres as a response to practical needs. In other words, genres of documents suggest situations and goals that people regularly seek to address through their communications. A person who recognizes one of these reoccurring goals knows what form is expected in response—what genre is appropriate in that situation. Miller described genre as “the conventions of discourse that a society establishes as ways of ‘acting together.’” These genres “change, evolve, and decay” depending on the “complexity and diversity of the society” [12]. Takeaway: In persisting communities, communication is more regular.

The concept of genre, like the advice of the classical rhetoricians, relies on a model of the actors in a social situation and their relationships. A social situation, of course, can be described in different ways in order to emphasize the roles and importance of different elements. Any analysis of the elements in a situation will include the audience for a communication and the author of the communication (which are not coincidentally the two actors in Shannon’s mathematical model).

A social model can be built around the community in which communication occurs. John Swales, for example, has suggested that genres are the product of particular kinds of communities in which members who have a common purpose and regular relationships need to perform the same kinds of actions again and again. The repetition in such an environment encourages the regularity of features in texts until the regular features themselves begin to take on meaning [13]. They can also be built around the communicative transaction. Lloyd Bitzer has suggested that communication is the timely act of a communicator to an audience to alleviate some pressure (an exigence). In Bitzer’s model of the rhetorical situation, it is the audience who is being persuaded, the exigence which causes the actor to communicate and the constraints under which that actor can act which make up the communicative environment [14]. Takeaway: There are different ways to model the social.

Some analyses of the situation consider how the document or text itself has a degree of agency in the situation. A report, just by its existence, stores some meaning, has some authority, and exists independent from its author. Some analyses consider social or cultural forces in which an author is set. A corporate environment or professional culture can certainly influence the way an author creates text as well as the way an audience receives or understands text. Some analyses identify the sources of motivation for a communication that are external to the author—orders, client requests, public demand—or the pressures felt by an audience as they access a text—urgency, long-term goal, even the lighting in the room where they are reading.

This Guide’s Approach

Models like those in the previous section are ways of describing, critiquing, and approaching everyday communication practices, and each contributes to the hybrid model for making writing decisions presented in this book. Writing in a workplace setting involves strategically deciding what arguments, forms, and words will best achieve your goal as a communicator. Writing decisions can be made using a rhetorical approach, considering how you might advance your argument persuasively given your sense of the social situation. They can also be made pragmatically, observing the communication around you and imitating the forms, arguments, and words that seem to match your communication conditions. When used in combination, these approaches inform one another and form a robust technique for making writing decisions.

When you write, consider the rhetorical situation of your text. Use the following questions to break down the social environment in which you are communicating:

What is your

purpose

for writing? What pressures (or exigencies) are motivating you to write (like a workplace requirement to report quarterly or a problem that requires the action of another to address)? What needs to be done and how could your text help to get that done? What would achievement of your purpose look like?

Who is your

audience

—the person(s) that you are addressing that may act on your behalf or may acknowledge your communication thereby enabling you to relieve that pressure? What do they know or believe, and what are their interests, preferences, needs, and motivations?

What is your

identity

as a professional and with respect to the audience who you are trying to persuade?

What is the

context

that surrounds this communicative transaction? What features of the environment or of the way in which your message is sent inform how your audience may receive or perceive it?

While these questions will enable you to prepare communication that are tailored to your purpose and the motivations of your audience, they rely on a personal social logic at the expense of attention to the habits and traditional practices that people commonly use to identify what is appropriate in a workplace. Using only these questions in a workplace might lead you to prepare a status report or a proposal that deeply considers the needs of your audience but does so in a way that is unrecognizable to your audience. For example, the regular use of a form, even a poorly designed form, can increase efficient identification of information for readers who are familiar with that form. The repetition of specific workplace patterns for texts, even at the expense of some purpose or audience considerations, is often more valuable to community members who need to be able to quickly identify the kind of action you are taking in your text.

When you write, you should also consider the pragmatic situation of your text. Use these questions to identify practices of the larger community in which your writing is situated:

What do you know about the

community

that surrounds you and your audience? What are your identity and your audience members’ identities in that community? How do these relative roles relate to cultural or social conventions maintained by the community that might govern how your text should be created, transmitted, or received?

Given this community, what

generic practices

exist that might resemble those you might use? What preexisting documents match your purpose, audience, and identity? How were they constructed, what form do they take, and how were they received? What authoritative resources, like style guides, are available?