Tech writers as story-tellers (LONG)

["Michael West" <mbwest -at- bigpond -dot- com>]

A schoolmate of mine who became a successful novelist
and writing teacher once told me that he thought writers 
of non-fiction---including science and technical writers, 
journalists, historians, and textbook authors---all need the 
gift of story-telling just as much as fiction writers do.

I often think about this remark, and I think he's right. If
a company hires me to write user-assistance material
for their products, the basic story that I need to tell
is the tale of how these products can make their users
more productive, more effective, and more confident
in achieving their business goals. I might  even go so 
far as to suggest that users of "my" products have more 
fun! (Sometimes, of course, this becomes an impossible 
fantasy and we have to settle for masking a product's 
surliness as cleverly as possible--a more demanding type
of story-telling.)

I find that thinking in terms of this basic "happy user"
story line helps me organize the technical material in 
a way that readily meets the needs of the users. Instead 
of describing a device or a software application as if it 
were a static object in a vacuum, I try to approach 
it as something to be *used* to accomplish something. 
It is "accomplishing" that gets the focus, rather than the
structural features of the object. After all, those structural
features are not just accidents (or so we hope)---they were
designed for a purpose.

I was struck by the difference between purpose-focused 
and structure-focused material this week when I looked
at the user's manual (so-called) that came with a notebook
computer I bought myself for Christmas.

The writer(s) have written a "user's guide" that reads like an 
engineering specification. Its focus is on describing technical 
specifications, with hardly a mention of *why* it's good that 
the thing was designed that way, and *how* these 
specifications can help me.

In other words, it doesn't *tell a story*. I suspect it was written 
by someone with good technical qualifications; someone 
who enjoys hanging out with engineers; who takes pride in 
acquiring and listing technical details, but who gives very little 
thought to what an average user really wants to know.

An example: I turned to a section headed "PC cards." What I
found was two pages of technical specifications ("the 
computer is equipped with a PC card (PCMCIA) expansion
slot that can accommodate two 5 mm Type II cards or one 
10.5 mm Type III card", etc.). Nowhere is there even a brief
mention of what a PC card is FOR, what it can DO for me and 
why I might want to  "accommodate" one. Unless I know that,
the technical specs are useless.

Certainly the technical specs have a place in the user guide.
But It seems to me that a "user's guide" should primarily be 
about "using" -- it should tell a *story* about a user (me) 
accomplishing tasks conveniently and successfully by means 
of the product I have sitting in front of me.


-- 
Michael West
Technical Writer
Melbourne, Australia



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