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Two Approaches to Improving Technical Writing

アップル社
By Andy (CC)
If you look at English books on bookstore shelves, you will find many on technical writing authored by professionals in the field. Less specialized texts are generally found in bookstores or online. Amazon is one online option: amazon.com or amazon.co.jp.

Technical books generally present two types of advice. The first type is broader statements that explain technical writing, and the second is narrower statements that define what technical writers do in specific cases. It is good to read a wide variety of these books as reading about the same material in different ways will help you to learn and integrate learning into your writing and editing skill set. However, such books tend to repeat much of the same material. If you look at the information about technical writing in our English writing resources section, you will see that some of this information has already been included on our site.

More specialized technical books are available. Such technical books may be very specialized from individual fields such as life science, physical science, applied geochemistry, medical economics, intellectual property, and organic chemistry.

For those who write, edit, translate, proofread, check, and provide quality assurance, the repetition found in technical writing texts is a way of life. We read and reread the same reference materials, articles, and books. We check and recheck our work, and apply the same rules and ways of working over and over. Even for those of us who are native English speakers, whether we proofread or translate from Japanese to English, we still need to be attentive and follow the technical standards in the two kinds of advice. For native Japanese speakers, we recognize that it may be infinitely harder for you to translate from Japanese into English. You must address all the problems of deciphering the Japanese language and all the problems of writing in English, your nonnative language.

船
By Ariston Collander (CC)
It is far easier for most of us to follow the technical writing advice that tells us what to do in specific cases. It is not that difficult to remember to use many instead of a large number of. It is not that difficult to remember not to use the fact that, a rule which is provided in almost every technical and non-technical writing book. Applying such rules to our technical writing does not require major behavior changes.

In technical writing, it is the broader statements for technical writers that we have greater difficulties using. These statements demand that we change our ways of working.

Blake and Bly list ten fundamental rules in The Elements of Technical Writing. Following these fundamentals is a demanding task, but doing so will greatly improve your technical writing. Here are the ten fundamental rules:
  1. Technical accuracy
  2. Usefulness
  3. Conciseness
  4. Completeness
  5. Clarity
  6. Consistency
  7. Correctness in Spelling, Punctuation, and Grammar
  8. Targeted
  9. Well Organized
  10. Interesting
Now, we ask that you please stop for a minute and consider the following questions before reading further:
  1. Which of these rules do you now follow?
  2. Do you understand them all?
We understand the purpose of following the ten fundamentals for better technical writing. We understand the requirements of the ten fundamentals. We do not need to read the sections in the book to understand their guidelines. After reading the sections though, we learned a few new details.

However, knowing the fundamental rules is not enough. When we are asked which of these we follow, we get a less than perfect score. We can explain a variety of reasons for our score. Many of our clients want our English translations to parallel the original Japanese document. Because approaches to language in the two cultures are linguistically very different, our task becomes more difficult. Clients sometimes ask us to improve the English document we receive enough so that the average native English speaker can read it and understand it. That is all clients sometimes want.

We would like to make every job we get -- from a clinical manual to a thesis or an abstract and from a dental hygiene program to an applied linguistics paper on World Englishes or a real estate development contract -- into a work of art. However, our transforming each document into a da Vinci of words is not always possible because of time and budget constraints.

We implement the ten fundamental guidelines. We hope you will do so too. Doing so will help to develop and improve your technical writing skill set. The ten fundamentals can actually help all of us whether we translate from Japanese to English, English to Japanese, or other languages. The fundamentals help us if we are writing in English, Japanese, or any other language, and they help us if we are proofreading or rewriting.

If you would like to read more about these ten fundamentals, please read The Ten Fundamentals of Technical Writing, which you can find on our specialties writing page. We also recommend that you buy The Elements of Technical Writing, read it, and use what you learn. This self-training will help your technical writing even more.


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