If you didn’t guess, I’ve been doing some reading on writing lately. Lately, I’ve been trying to post a little more frequently, so I thought I should get better at the whole writing thing. Granted, I’ve come a long way since trying to pen that fantasy novel in seventh grade on a early model IBM PC (don’t ask, I’ve forgotten the entire plot… really!), but composition still doesn’t feel natural to me. There also a few writing projects that are coming my soon, so I figured I could learn a few tricks before I tackled them.

All right, so I wasn’t actively seeking out anything on writing. I just happened to stumble upon a couple decent articles in a relatively short amount of time. Lucky me! There have been other articles I’ve seen lately, but these two stuck with me for some reason. That might mean they could be useful. Heh, something useful… the Internet continues to surprise me in new ways.

Writing on Technical Writing

The first I article I ran across was Amy Hoy’s post on the Five Sins of Tech Writing. I believe I’ve seen some of Amy’s articles regarding Ruby on Rails, but I apparently never hung around to check out her other posts. She’s a very thoughtful and well-typed author. She’s even working on a book, and her blog indicates it would be a very decent read. Amy is also a UI designer, so her Slash7 site is a nice bit of eye candy on its own.

The point of Amy’s article is that anyone who’s read any amount of technically based “literature” has surely come across some that totally did not do the job. She basically says unless you are someone who absorbs any style of writing in one pass, you likely have serious problems with the state of tech writing as a whole. I certainly cannot disagree with her.

Technical writing is truly one of the most difficult types of reading for just about anyone. I can’t count the number of times I have failed to get all the way through or feel I didn’t get as much out of the text as I should have. Amy breaks the problems of technical writing into 5 key factors:

  • Losing the reader
  • Making the reader feel stupid
  • Failing to stick
  • Being a total bore
  • Not providing much-needed context

She then goes into detail on each problem area. The only thing missing are reasonable solutions to the issues. However, Amy knows this and is saving solutions for a later post. Head over and see the original article, so you’re ready to read the “answers” once they become available.

Writing and Thinking More Clearly… and Checking Your Math

The second decent article I read on writing and related subjects was actually a webified PowerPoint presentation. It’s titled “How to Write More Clearly, Think More Clearly, and Learn Complex Material More Easily.” This is a presentation created by Dr. Michael Covington from the the University of Georgia. For me, slide shows can often be as tedious as most technical writing. This set of “slides”, however, get my attention.

Dr. Covington does indeed clearly write out how to do everything advertised in the title. He provides a solid review of the steps to writing effectively and clearly. He covers planning, drafting, revising, editing and even some tips on formating. While, most of us learned these in grammar classes starting in elementary school, it never hurts to review. It’s a great reminder for all those rules that I know I rarely think about consciously.

There was one overlooked flaw in this section, however. This involved the use of some quasi-algebraic “factoid” when discussing writing revisions. In Slide 29, Covington writes:

Time taken to process and n-word sentence is proportional to n3, or more.

Now, I’m pretty sure he could have picked a different letter for his description than “n” and still proved his point. I realize he’s 99.99999999% likely to have meant absolutely nothing by it, but it just seemed weird to me. Surely, I’m not the only person who has read that and tilted their head in reflective pause, even for a second. Has anyone ever asked him to swap in an ‘x’, ‘y’ or ‘m’ instead? Likely totally meaningless, but I had to point it out.

Anyway… The presentation then slides (pun intended) into thinking more clearly. This area covers use of language, logic and epistemology. The language portion involves Covington’s statement that we use language (on some level) to do the majority of our thinking. If we can’t understand the language, we’re going to have difficulties thinking about something. The end result is to beware of “talking about things without knowing what they are.” Know anyone who does this? Possibly yourself?

Okay. I admit it. I have. Yikes!

Dr. Covington, then transitions the language discussion into use of logic, and then epistemology. Epistemology, the study of how to acquire knowledge, or as I call it, learning how to learn, is something I feel is essential to continued intellectual growth. I consider college to be the final chance to be taught how to learn. After that, most people are on their own.
This brings the presentation to its final section on how to learn more easily. Covington mentions three tools for easier learning:

  1. Use a suitable learning strategy.
  2. Insist on clear understanding.
  3. Organize the knowledge for yourself.

Different situations call for different learning strategies, if you don’t have clearly understanding you cannot learn more, and organizing knowledge is unique to the individual. I suppose writing this post is my own way of organizing all this information. And yes, I do believe I might even understand it a little better than I did.

I’ve already pointed you to the HTML version of the presentation, but if you want other forms, you can go to the presentation’s main page to get it in a PowerPoint .ppt or Adobe PDF format.

Happy writing, thinking and learning!