by Ben Davies, STC Manitoba Program Chair

Reprinted from “Manuscript,” the newsletter of the Manitoba chapter of STC, by permission of author and editor.

For the past year, I’ve been a technical writer for an engineering-based company. As a result, I often deal with difficult-to-understand documents written by technical people. Without reading these documents, an outsider might assume they are complicated because they are filled with complex information; in reality, the documents are complicated because of the way they are written.

The following paragraph is an example of a paragraph that is very complicated because of the way it was written:

This key only activates radio buttons that are de-activated. Questions that need to be answered by activating the appropriate radio button are given multiple options (two or more). By default, one of the option radio buttons will be activated. If you would like to activate an option other than the one activated by default, move to the desired option radio button using the TAB key and press the SPACEBAR. This will activate the desired option radio button and deactivate the one activated by default. For example, when indicating the gender of the Applicant, you may want to activate the Female radio button. Since the Male radio button is activated by default, move to the Female radio button using the TAB key and press the SPACEBAR. This will activate the Female radio button and deactivate the Male radio button.

After reading this paragraph, the following question comes to mind: Is using radio buttons so complicated that you actually need to provide a detailed example?

I call such paragraphs “passion fluff”—text that someone has put a lot of time and effort into writing but that really say nothing.

The “fluff” in the example above is all the times the author re-iterates the same concept in different ways in an attempt to clarify an already convoluted set of instructions. The example itself is “fluff”, because using radio buttons isn’t complicated.

I decided to re-write this paragraph to see if I could take out the passion fluff and came up with the following:

Questions are answered by highlighting the radio button next to the appropriate answer.

Note: Only one radio button can be highlighted per question.

I had an epiphany last year when I realized people don’t like to read, especially when they are trying to complete a task. Therefore, essential information buried in long, convoluted paragraphs is useless. Most technical writers already know this, and I hope I’m preaching to the choir; however, many subject matter experts don’t know this, especially if they came from University where writing long (10+ lines), convoluted, academic-style paragraphs and sentences (like this one) are a way of life.

Contrary to popular belief, academic writing has no place in the business and technical world of documentation. Because of this, it is our job to teach passion fluff writers what is acceptable and what isn’t. Allowing someone to get away with passion fluff does two things: it lowers your expectations of the other person’s writing ability, and it encourages the other person to continue writing incorrectly.

Remember, though, that passion fluff is very difficult to deal with because of the passion that’s involved.

A strategy you could take to help passion fluff writers is to re-write something they’ve written to show the value of clear communication.

The goal of re-writing something isn’t to prove how badly they write, but to make them better writers. Show them what is right, rather than showing them how what they did was wrong.