Suggestions

Assumptions engage our human emotions.

• Some assumptions are embarrassing. CBC Radio “Morningside” host (the late) Peter Gzowski, long in a job that paid more than a living wage, once made the assumption that retirement tax breaks were available to all… when they require a minimum income.
• Some assumptions are infuriating. In the “Doonesbury” comic strip, cartoonist Garry Trudeau once did a masterful job of deflating privlege rather than ranting about it. In the daily strip for Wednesday, 19 June 1985, Trudeau has Congresswoman Lacey Davenport attempt to raise awareness of homelessness among rich constituents in Palm Beach, Florida. The heart-cry of one distressed-looking lady is “That’s awful! Why don’t they just move to their country homes?”
• Some assumptions are surprising. I grew up in one of the majority of Canadian provinces that celebrate Veteran’s Day, November 11, as a public holiday. When I moved to Ontario, the province that does most of the posturing about honouring our servicemen and servicewomen in the so-called national media, I was taken aback to learn that Ontario does not recognize the holiday. (It merely “observes” it.)

Because assumptions are so closely connected to emotions, you as a technical writer need to be aware that people can get defensive about their assumptions. Part of the defensiveness arises because everyone is unaware of all their assumptions. Being made aware that you have made an assumption can unsettle the ego, regardless of what the assumption was, and unrelated to whether the assumption was valid.

Writing requires that you try to reach your reader. Technical writing doubly so. And that’s the part that isn’t easy. There are obstacles, and you have to do the work of overcoming all of them all of the time. Simultaneously.

Here are five of my rules for technical writers.

1. You have to understand your topic.

   In a lot of life, in conversations and in writing, you can have a vague idea of how something works. (For example, you can put gasoline in a car without understanding how the gas fuels an engine.) That’s not true in technical writing. You cannot explain what you do not understand. You have to know exactly what the ideas are, and what all the words mean. Although you don’t have time to become a subject matter expert in everything you write about, you must invest the time and brain-strain to become a student of the subject. And you must resist the seductive pleadings from non-writers to just clean up the writing of someone who does understand the topic. You’re not there to give a polish to writing that you do not understand. You’re there to explain. You have to take that commitment seriously.

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