Its Not How You Say, Its What You Say It.......Or Something Like That

After reading Carolyn Miller's essay, "A Humanistic Rationale for Technical Writing," I really began thinking about the importance of presentation and writing skills in the working world outside of the classroom.

As an engineer, presentation is everything when it comes to putting your work on the market for potential clients to buy into. It is even more important when you are presenting your preliminary design for a client's approval as I recently learned in my Capstone Design Class.

After the many hours of design and Auto CAD work, I had to put together a proposal to sell my design idea to a perspective "client" who had hired me for the job. I had to show all the features that were requested and if necessary explain why I did not include some due to technical reasons.

The most important portion of the presentation was the oral section, because when you are presenting in front of a live audience, there is no spell check, word count, or edit-undo ability you can call upon when you make a mistake like these people did......

The How to Write a How To

Currently I have been struggling with creating a set of instructions to teach  someone how to perform a specific task that they do not currently know how to do. This has been quite a challenge, first off by thinking of some function that is original, yet not too complex to perform, and secondly by putting the document together in a concise fashion so as not to have the reader spinning in circles.

 Being an engineer, I tend to lean towards the spinning in circles mode when it comes to writing technical "how to" data. I find it curious how easy it seems to follow a given set of directions without thinking about how difficult it probably was to create them in the first place.

After my first draft, I found that as hard as I tried, I still managed to fill the instructions with as much technical details to make it into a textbook. My girlfriend can attest to this as she was my first subject to not succeed in understanding the procedure, and even after 25 minutes of explaining, I dove too deep into "civil world" as she tends to call it.

This was both frustrating and positive advice, because I realized I had to address a specific audience for the task and not the entire world......simple, I wrote it for younger engineers whom my techno babble would at least make some sense in theoretical terms. To further challenge myself I also chose to address it to persons in the field who would most likely benefit having a quick summary guide to the topic.

After reducing many syllables and inserting a good many pictures, I was finially satisfied that I had the proper balance of technical background and ease of use found in the common instructions....although I doubt that anyone will ever perform a slump test in their free time or unless they are sweathing on the side of the road.

All this leaves me wondering how on earth those poor souls at LEGO design their complicated instructions to put the thousands of colored blocks together to make a suitable car, tank or airplane....for kids, using pictures only. My hat is off to them.


I mean seriously, how do you design a instructions guide for this......

Non-Instructive Instructions and Burning iPods

So my computer crashed last week, and I lost all my iTunes. Great. Even better is the fact that when I try to plug my iPod into my computer to charge it, the iTunes tries to sync my iPod, further erasing any music I had left on the device itself. Luckily I was able to pull the plug before I lost any music. After struggling for over an hour with various online "do-it-yourself" websites telling my various ways to replace my lost songs on my computer with the ones on my iPod, I realized just how true todays lecture was on the value of writing instructions.

Many of the sites I visited were for a much more technically adept person than myself, meaning they could most likely recode their iPod or hack into it. This experience gave me some insight to being a secondary audience and having to figure out what the primary audience already knows in order to complete the task. I obviously had to understand a great deal of technical computer jargon or have various programs at my disposal to complete the task, and the knowledge of how to utalize them without setting my pc on fire. Luckily for me, I finially stumbled across a site that had simple instructions at a level that I could comprehend and follow. Thank goodness someone managed to put together a set of steps with a target audience, me, in mind. Who knew a day in lecture could be related to a discombobulation of events that thankfully resulted in me getting my Satchmo back in one piece.

BYAHHHH!!!! - A Rhetorical Situation

While Reading "A Rhetorical Situation" by Lloyd Blitzer, I couldnt help but laughing at a portion of text in the first few pages of his essay. He mentions the fact that "each reader probably can recall a specific time and place when there was an opportunity to speak on some urgent matter, and after the opportunity was gone he created in private thought the speech he should have uttered earlier in the situation." When I read this I couldnt help but point out that there have been many times in history that the reader had probibially wished he had not said something when he did, and as a result it formed a negative rhetoric that was used against him either deliberately or unintentionally.

The best example I recalled was during the 2004 Democratic Presidential Nomination, when Howard Dean was speaking at a rally about the future of his campaign and in a moment of over-enthusiasm, he uttered a gutteral "BYAHHH!!!!" on live television. This 30 second clip served as the end of his campaign as the audience simply could not take him seriously after the endless press storm surrounding the event. He eventually lost the nomination, but gratefully provided a terrific example of rhetorical backfiring. Blitzer hit the nail on the head when he stated that  "every audience at any moment is capable of being changed in some way by speech," and it truely does occur wither intentional or not on the speakers part.

Aristotle's Riddle of Rhetoric

Although I was told reading Aristotle's Rhetoric was as confusing as reading it in the original Attic Greek, I found it to be no more difficult than any other really technical writing I have encountered. Aristotle made some very good points about rhetoric and its uses in the political, forensic, and ceremonial contexts. He also made a pretty observation that all men use rhetoric to discuss statements, maintain them, and defend or attack them when provoked.

I found it pretty funny that he referenced a court in Areopagus that did not allow talk pertaining to "non-essentials," namely things that would cause a judge to make a ruling on his emotions as opposed to facts. Its slightly ironic that the ancient Greeks foresaw this problem, because today it seems that is the main tool that lawyers use to persuade juries to give out the verdicts they desire for their clients. Aristotle was point on when he said that "it is of great moment that well-drawn laws should themselves define all the points they possibly can and leave as few as many to be to the decision of the judges." I fully agree with this statement, due to the fact today, even laws as explicitly defined as murder can be twisted and altered in a courtroom to be portrayed as something it is not, or into something less than it appears to the normal viewer.

Almost borrowing from the phrase "the pen is mightier than the sword," Aristotle put in a very witty comment on how he thinks it is absurd that a man should be ashamed of being unable to defend himself physically, but not to be ashamed if he cannot defend himself with speach and reason. He even points out that the ability to use rational speech is one of the things that defines us as humans as opposed to being just another animal in the food chain. I find it a little ironic that Aristotle's puple Alexander the Great, did not seem to heed the words of his tutor, and proceeded to conquer nearly the entire known world.

Overall the reading went by pretty well with my cup of morning coffee. I enjoyed listening to and contemplating the thoughts of a man who has been studied and critiqued since before the time of Christ. It stuns me to think of how many other generations of men have read his works and have been spurred to think more about the uses of rhetoric and language as a form of offensive and defensive prose, instead of merely shooting the breeze.