Putting The Reader First

I always try to focus on the reader. It's the motivation and interest of the reader that determine the success of a document, and I believe that understanding the psychology of the audience can be just as important as understanding the technical details of the subject matter.

The Classroom as a Usability Test

My preoccupation with the audience comes from much time spent in front of college classrooms, teaching technical subjects to freshman liberal arts students. They're a tough audience, fulfilling breadth requirements against their will. Still, they are motivated if they see how technical content connects with their lives. I'm proud to say that my courses have always had long waiting lists, and students have consistently rated me within the top 10 percent of their instructors.

A Usability Checklist

Certain things follow from my focus on the reader:

-Careful analysis of the audience Before beginning to write or edit, it's essential to determine the audience's background and their purpose in using the document.
-Concise writing style Extraneous words distract readers from the content they need.
-Simplicity Readers of technical documents want their lives made easier, not more complex by unnecessary jargon, obscure references, or overly complex exercises.
-Context All readers, whether from a technical or nontechnical background, benefit from understanding how ideas connect to each other and are situated in the bigger picture. Learning can be viewed as a process of connecting new experiences with the cognitive schema we already have; when our documents show how new information connects to familiar ideas, we help people with this process.
-Real-world examples People instinctively respond best to examples from the real world--they understand that the way to ensure the value of their learning is to imitate a successful model, and they trust actual experience more than they trust the authority of the author.

What About Haiku?

OK, sometimes we write just for fun, and the reader can like it or lump it.