Awesome

Just got a request from Karla Kitalong, my M.A. thesis advisor, to use some of my professional blog posts for one of her tech writing classes at Michigan Tech University. Have a look if you're interested in what I have to say about my day job...note that I'm talking about the writing aspects here, not the actual space content. That's a whole 'nother thing.

Creating Documents Without Guidance

I've discovered over the years that vague assignments are either a joy or a pain for the professional technical writer. A typical scenario is something like this: your boss or customer comes to you and says, "We have X amount of information we want to get out, but we don't quite know what to do with it. Want to take a crack at it?"

To which I usually reply, "Heck, yeah!" and I dive in. Not everyone is so gleeful about such an open-ended assignment. The top two questions I've been trained to ask for any new document are:

1. Who's my audience?
2. What's the purpose of the document (i.e. how do I want them to react after reading it)?

Sometimes I might not get clear-cut answers to even that...the point is just to do information organization/design (More on that in a moment). In addition to the two questions above, there are usually two other questions that affect any document a technical communicator is called upon to produce:

• What form or format will my document take?
• What style will I need to use?

In general, the form and format will depend upon the amount of information that needs to be conveyed, while the style will depend on your audience.

But let's say, for the sake of this discussion, that you've received minimal guidance about your content except that the final product will be coming from your corporate president, senior project manager, or someone else near the top of the food chain. I actually enjoy this sort of assignment because it's challenging to think like the boss. You've got, maybe, 2-3 pages' worth (750 words, with or without pictures) of content, which might or might not be organized, and might or might not be on 2-3 pieces of paper...and you might or might not be familiar with the subject matter. Where do you start?

1. Read: Not to be a smart@$$, but you read what you've been given in whatever order it's presented to you. It might not make the slightest bit of sense, but you have to start somewhere.
2. Research: This usually means looking up or asking whoever you think might know what unfamiliar terminology means. Ideally you do as much Googling or sniffing through Wikipedia or internal publications before you ask. (I got burned on this a few times before a manager asked me, point-blank, "Do you ever look things up before asking?" Shame-faced, I went back to my cube and did my homework before asking another durnfool question.
3. Brainstorm: So now that you have the general gist of things...you know what the topic is, what's being said about it, and you know how much stuff you have to work with. Now it's time to take that extra 10 minutes to brainstorm about the pile of data in front of you and in your head. Take a stab at asking:
   --Who do YOU think the audience should be?
   --How do you think they would want to be addressed?
   --What's the most effective way to convey the information and get the reaction you (or your executive) wants?
   --What's the best way to organize the information?
   --How should the information appear visually? (This is the point where my friend Dr. OZMG suggested, "Use pretty fonts and emoticons!" And in truth, depending on your content, this might not be such a bad idea. Sometimes a clever visual gimmick, outside the usual corporate or institutional practice, is exactly what is needed to get your audience's attention.)
   
   Anything longer than ten minutes, either by hand-writing or making out a list on your computer, is probably wasting your time. Work with a peer or two if this helps you.
4. Organize: Take your ideas from your brainstorming session and put them into the order and (rough) format that most makes sense to you. This is where the technical communicator, in my view, can add value to any document. The trick is understanding your content enough to know what order or layout most makes sense for the user. Do you have something with a lot of steps? Then your content should be arranged chronologically. Do you have something that needs to be understood geographically or by layout, like a map or a new form? Perhaps you need to work with your graphics person to develop an easy-to-use "mind map" for your content to guide the user visually. Of course you might actually BE the graphics person; but even if you aren't, you should have some idea of how you want your content to appear--electronically or on the written page. Your graphics person might come up with ideas you hadn't thought of because visual imagination is much different from literary imagination--one of the reasons I'm very grateful for the graphics people in my area.
5. Draft: Start taking a SWAG (engineering term for "scientific wild-@$$ guess") at what you want to say. You've got the content, you've got the layout, now you just need to start doing the brick-and-mortar work of putting words together. Get the basic thoughts down first.
6. Polish: Your first draft is almost guaranteed to look and read nothing like the final product. This was a hard lesson for an English major to learn coming out of college, where I liked to think that the fire of raw inspiration would carry the day. The serious work isn't getting it down in one fell swoop, but getting it right. This is the point where you start trying to capture the "voice" of your customer and the tone you want to set for your audience. If it's an Important Thing, like something to do with legal or regulatory compliance, your tone is direct, serious, and no-kidding-this-has-to-be-done-or-you-go-to-jail. If it's introducing a new product or service, the tone should be enthusiastic ("See what we're doing" or "See what we're doing for you?!"). If it's something warm and fuzzy, like the annual Independence Day party, perhaps a little levity is called for. It also helps to know the personality or preferred style of your executive. If their behaviors or preferences aren't well known, you might have to ask.
7. Peer Review: Have another writer or, if none is available, your customer, review your best-guess, polished draft. Expect other ideas and revisions. Depending on whether it's the customer or a peer, you might or might not have more say about changes. If your peer or customer questions why you organized the information a particular way, be prepared to explain your thought process. This can go on for one or multiple cycles. Again, don't take this as the mark of a bad product or a reflection on your work. Requirements change for communication products as much as engineering products.
8. Finalize: This is where you tweak the minor stuff...missing punctuation, grammatical and other typos, and then turn things over to your graphics person(s) to go to print or online.

I probably could have stopped at step 6, but I've learned a lot about product improvement even toward the end of a development cycle, so it's worth considering the entire "life" of a document as you're creating it.

In the end, you should have a product--web site, presentation, letter, white paper, brochure, or other document--that accomplishes what your customer wanted in the first place. And yes, I do get paid to do this.

Potpourri CXI

Not too much today, but here are a couple of sites for your reference...

From Kraft and Triscuits, my favorite cracker for the last 30 years or so, a site called "Why Snackrifice?" The point of said site is to show how Kraft cheese/cracker combinations won't break the bank. I've got a cousin working advertising at Kraft, but I don't know if she's managing this site. Might have to ask. Anyhow, since I'm still employed, my grocery habits have not changed, and Triscuits are a regular part of the dietary rotation. My gratuitous shill: enjoy some today!

From Karla, my former thesis advisor, a reminder that Thursday is World Usability Day. What the heck is that? you might ask. Here's what they say:

World Usability Day was founded to ensure that the services and products important to life are easier to access and simpler to use

Karla also sent a link for the World Usability Day site at the school she's teaching at now, Michigan Tech. Useable products--from cell phones to rockets to user instructions--are good things. It takes more thought up front to make things easier for the user downstream. Sort of like an "effortless" prose style that is graceful and easy to read usually requires many, many drafts. So think before you dump junk on the product shelves--or on your readers!

Thoughts on Dachau

The following is an edit of some of my thoughts after my visit to the Dachau concentration camp in Germany, outside Munich.

Cruelty sanctioned by the state is that much more horrific because there's no one to appeal to short of another state (assuming they care) or God. And what if Hitler had won the war, and the evil had gone on and on?

"Picture a boot, stamping on a human face, forever."
--George Orwell, 1984

The evil didn't stop with mere physical abuse. Humiliation and degradation go hand and hand with the operation. Bodies are meagerly clothed in institutional striped uniforms; heads are shaved, gold fillings removed; the people are underfed and then made to work as slaves. More beatings for poor work or slacking off or passing out from exhaustion. Survival is obtained through favors or kowtowing or luck or a raw, relentless will to live.

But all those qualities need not matter. Illness might come, or injury. Lacking a healthy immune system, positive attitude, or adequate medical care, one might go from the infirmary to the firing squad or the gas chamber. Naked, bewildered, disbelieving to the end that their own countrymen (or any men) would do such a thing, they nevertheless walked into rooms made to look like showers, and from those shower heads came a particularly nasty pesticide, Zyklon B. People would push and claw their way toward the door to escape. Those not crushed succumbed to the gas.

The horror didn't end for some. The chambers had to be emptied and cleaned, which meant some prisoners--tattooed on their arms, like the dead--were ordered to remove the bodies and then bury them or throw the bodies into industrial ovens.

Every day like this for six years or more. Some deny it happened, and some just wish it would. How dare they? How dare anyone?

*

The camps required a wicked mutation of science and engineering. Someone had to develop Zyklon B. Someone had to experiment to determine the right concentration of the gas to kill X number of people. Someone had to determine how long it would take to kill the occupants and how long it would take the gas to dissipate before reopening the chamber. Others had to make the poison. Others built the chambers. Others had to determine where they would be placed in the camps and how to handle the rounding up of prisoners. And someone had to write everything down--the orders and procedures.

Human minds did this, calmly, rationally, methodically. Every step of the way there were men who did the work, signed off on it, and moved the horrid mechanisms down the next step in the chain. So what if you loved your country? So what if you hated your enemies? Was engineering death at such a personal level worth it?

I make no claims to purity of intention, that I could somehow have been "the good German." That step in the process where I mention writing down the processes? That would've been the technical writers of the day. One of my grad school professors included a section in his book on technical communication ethics on procedures written for a mobile gas chamber the Nazis tried to develop. The person who had to write that stuff--what kind of nightmares did he have? But he did the work anyway.

*

And the question still comes back: how does a person or a party manage to twist a nation's conscience so? "Nazi" is thrown around as an epithet today as if every political enemy were automatically as evil as Hitler, probably because Hitler did not start with big things off the bat. He started small. And human nature is not that different across distances of time or nationality. It can start with not liking a particular already-unpopular group of people. You don't say anything because, while you don't exactly hate that group, you don't exactly like them, either. And if, say, the government started targeting that group for extra taxes, punishing fines, or hostile treatment, well, you're likely to shut up because you don't have a dog in that fight. The day might even come when you personally benefit from the government's campaign--they take property and possessions from the unpopular group and give it to you. You are now in the government's pocket, as they well know. You've accepted their moral premise, and you've profited from their (and your) moral lapse. How can you speak against the government now? And when your country goes to war with someone else, welll, you're all the more likely to volunteer to fight and fight hard, because you don't want to be on the losing side. After all, you know what you did. And if you get letters from your wife that the people in X group have disappeared and there are rumors of death camps, that's just wild speculation, enemy propaganda...but you can't help wondering how true it is. After all, you know what you did.

*

But all these attitudes still have to come from somewhere. A people's moral and ethical compass isn't lost all at once. That compass is directed by religion and philosophy. Drop religion, as so much of Western Civilization has done, and you're left only with philosophy, and the 20th century produced some of the nastiest schools of thought in human history. The beliefs of these schools include beliefs that:

• The state is more important than you.
• It's better to remain silent and keep your place than stand up for a fellow human being and be forced out of it.
• The use of force is okay as long as you're not on the receiving end of it.
• Everything the state tells you about a particular group is the truth and commands your obedience when that state orders you to kill.
• God does not exist, so you must get what you can out of this life; protect yourself, your family, and your possessions with every bit of strength you can muster...or entrust them all to the state or a leader for protection.
• Everything the state tells you is a lie, and only self-appointed demagogues can clear away the corruption and indecision of mere elected leaders.
• Your own security is worth protecting at any cost.
• The state's security is worth protecting at any cost.
• A powerful, charismatic leader is worth trusting to any end if you believe his cause is just.

Dachau is a stain on all of us, not just the Germans or Western Civilization, but upon all human beings. Philosophy led the way, science and technology merely cleared the path.

*

What got to me were the damned ovens. It's one thing to hear about them or read about them, or even just see a picture; it's another thing to be there in the room with them, or to walk through the gas chambers and realize that the things actually existed. In fact, what bothered me the most was how clean everything at Dachau was...almost as if they could open for business at any moment.

A couple on my tour had visited a village in France called Oradour-sur-Glane. There, in June 1944, four days after D-Day, soldiers of the 2nd Waffen-SS Division Das Reich rounded up over 600 French citizens and massacred them. General Charles de Gaulle, after visiting the site, ordered the bodies buried, but the town to be left as it was...as a reminder. Oradour-sur-Glane was not on my tour, but I'd be tempted to go there at some point. Seeing things as they were, even after 60+ years of time had worn things away, seems to bring home the point better than this spruced-up museum place at Dachau. It's just too clean to be believed or even, really, accepted.

Below are some other pictures I took during my brief time there. The compound is massive when walking it on your own, but small when you consider how many people they crammed in there at one time. The administration, prison buildings, walls, and guard towers are mostly intact--in fact, the U.S. Army kept prisoners in the prison building up through the mid 1950s. The barracks have been torn down, with two reconstructions built. There were 30 long shacks in all, the outline of each depicted by concrete perimeters (the original foundations?). A long row of poplar trees fills the aisle between the two rows of buildings...unlikely to be original. The prison building is now a museum, which includes maps, pictures, equipment from the camps, memorial stones and flowers sent by various cultural and military groups, and art inspired (if one can call it that) by the camps.

This piece is a little creepy, featuring as it does emaciated, burnt-looking corpses. In fact, corpses, barbed wire, and madness are prominent in all the visual representations found at the camp, including at some of the religious sites.

The uniform worn by prisoners.










One of the pictures from the museum. No apologies for the horrific nature of it. That is why we visit these places--so we don't forget.









Another image from the museum, this one drawn by one of the prisoners, shows the beating of one of the prisoners by several guards. Again, this was done by agents of the government, acting under the express command of the highest levels of leadership.










The camp has several religious buildings attached to it, including a Jewish shrine, a Catholic shrine, a "Reformed Christian" church, a Catholic nunnery, and an Eastern Orthodox chapel. There was a service occurring at the latter when I arrived, but out of respect I didn't take any pictures.

The gateway to the Jewish temple. Note the spikes.

Exterior of the Jewish temple/shrine. Visitors walk down a ramp to the interior, as if walking into the grave.

This is the Reformed Christian Church at Dachau. I don't understand the symbology, but there are half-crosses all around the building. Otherwise, the place seems to lack rational shape or symbol. Is that a message in itself?

Another terrifying piece of sculpture: distorted bodies pieces together in all directions like some barbed wire experiment gone horribly wrong.

One of several guard towers still in place.

"Arbeit macht frei," the motto at the gates of Dachau, Auschwitz, and all the other camps, I believe, means, "Work makes you free."

The smokestack from the damned ovens.

If those things were going as often as was estimated, there is no way the local people did not know. Expressions of denial were not sufficient for the American soldiers who saw these places, and rightly so. Everyone in Germany was--and is--required to visit one of the camps to rub their noses in it so they never forget. Good.

I confess, I came out of the camp wanting to bomb the country flat. But then I thought about it and realized that, no, living memory and constant reminders are absolutely necessary. How sick and unfortunate it is that human beings need such reminders. Not just the Germans, but all of us. But need them we do, to remind ourselves of what cruelty we are capable of...even bombing a country flat.

The Case for Liberal Arts Majors in the Space Business

"NASA hires engineers, they don't hire writers."
--K. E. Leahy (a.k.a. Mom)

"I've got plenty of engineers. What I need is somebody who can write."
--Col. Robert M. Weimer, U.S. Army (Ret.)

I have one of the more unique jobs at NASA, in that my job is to write conference papers, outreach materials, presentations, and speeches for the Ares Projects. Some of my non-techie friends are baffled about this: "How do you write about all that stuff if you don't know rocket science?" On the one hand, they're right, and I spend at least one editing cycle having a subject matter expert going over my stuff to make sure it's not technically wrong. However, it's also to my advantage not to be completely fluent in "Engineerish," "Scientistese," or even "Governmentese." Why? Because my audience is not other engineers. I operate in that broad, hazy territory between rocket geek and normal person.

I actually wanted to be a science fiction writer when I graduated with a B. A. in English lit. That didn't quite work out because I didn't know enough about science or engineering to make that stuff plausible, nor did I understand people well enough to write about them effectively. Good thing I didn't quit my day job.

But English majors still have their place in the universe--yes, even in the uber-techie world of NASA's Constellation Program--and there are even ways to apply the English lit-crit skills that we learn instead of math or chemistry. For example, a general education in linguistics, semantics, and other courses that focus on the structure of language can enable the writer to "understand" engineering without doing the math. What follows will probably horrify my engineering customers, but they cannot argue much about it, because I get more and more right all the time.

Let's say you've got some hypothetical hieroglyphics in front of you, like this:

"It has been determined that the potential for degradation of pofcore performance is increased by drendelation of starboard riffleclamps under increased thermal environments."

Now some of these words are made up (and if they are real, my apologies--they're there to make a point, not describe a rocket). But a wise enough reader can extract a few things from this sentence:

• You can see that some sort of performance is degraded by drendelation. You don't know what drendelation is right now, but that's not important. You need to deconstruct the sentence some more to get the whole picture.
• "Increased thermal environments" is a lofty, engineerish way of saying something has been heated up. You know: sort of like "In today's contemporary society vis a vis..." is English Professorish for "Today."
• The long string of prepositions actually provides a trail of breadcrumbs that leads you back to the actual meaning. It's not just "drendelation" that is reducing X performance, but drendelation of the starboard riffleclamps. And that drendelation is caused by increasing heat.
• "It has been determined" is just more passive voice. Depending on the audience, the subject, and the purpose of your document, you can provide an actor for who is doing the determining. For example: We determined, The Ares Projects determined, or NASA determined.
• So now we can more or less determine what the primary subject, verb, and object of this sentence are:
  Subject: the starboard riffleclamps
  Verb: degrade
  Object: performance
  The rest of the words can be moved around to suit the editor's preferred word order, like so:
  
  "The engineering team determined that the starboard riffleclamps could degrade pofcore performance because they become drendeled (or experience drendeling) when they are heated."
  
  And imagine that: the sentence even flows better. Who'd have guessed?

Now again, I know nothing about engineering. And obviously I know jack about riffleclamps or any other imaginary technology. Engineers DO write in English, though it is the job of the discerning technical writer to sort out what that English is doing, and how all the parts fit together. This is literally how I "taught" myself engineering, first in the defense business and then later in the space business. Mind you, I knew bits and pieces from reading this or that bit of Clarke or Heinlein, but a lot of my rocketry education came from puzzling out what subjects did what things to what objects until the engineering terms came more naturally. Once I could piece together the words and what widgets did what things, the rest was wordsmithing, and I know that stuff.

The point is, technical writing can be done by non-engineers, and done with great facility. And when it comes to learning the hard stuff, there are definitely more direct and logical ways to go about it than the one I just outlined (though sometimes textbooks don't cover the items I'm asked to write about or edit). However, aside from making the engineerish clearer to a non-technical audience, where I believe liberal-arts majors make their best contributions is in tailoring their content for particular audiences. That requires a bit of imagination and "character research," as you have to a) find out who your audience is for a particular application, and then b) imagine what might motivate your particular reader/listener to care about the subject enough to read further.

And I would have to say that the stereotype of the engineer as having no sense of poetry or "mission" in their work is just that. I'm surrounded daily by people who translate the poetry of mathematics or physical shapes into actual hardware that sends people into space. There are days I wish like heck I could do that. Many of them can even verbally rattle off some very profound answers about why they got into the space business or what the space program means to them. They just don't like to write. To which I say, "Great! More job security for me."

Science Fiction as a Way to Teach Technical Writing

Huzzah! Apparently this blogging thing can be quite a racket if you know what you're doing. I just won a free t-shirt. Darlene, The Science Cheerleader, sent me the following comment:

Hey Bart!Thanks for the terrific posts. Would you kindly summarize one or two "science facts" folks can learn from a great science fiction book? You are, officially, the winner of the Science Cheerleader T-Shirt.

She was responding to my posting below, which suggested that science fiction was an excellent introduction and teaching mechanism for aspiring English majors to find a career in technical writing.

Once upon a time, I created (but didn’t give) a presentation entitled “Everything I Needed to Know About Technical Writing I Learned from Reading Science Fiction.” My basic argument is that:

The SF writer:

• Describes an unfamiliar world
• Creates challenges related to or brought about by real or imagined aspects of science
• Provides solutions to those challenges based on knowledge learned in the environment

The technical communicator:

• Seeks to help the user understand an unfamiliar technology and solve certain problems based on the communicator’s description of that technology

I used typical SF milieus--”Enormous Big Thing” stories, time travel stories, and SF detective stories–as means of teaching technical communicators mental approaches for dealing with completely new topics or technologies. I summed up with:

You might not ever encounter “enormous big things,” time travel, or crimes in space, BUT…

--You can face large mysteries

--You can face documents or processes that need to be placed in chronological order…or some other order that makes sense to the user at the time

--You may experience “crimes” related to human-technology interactions. So…

Read some science fiction today!

I suppose SF has taught me the most about the consequences and the potential impacts of natural phenomena and technology. Consider the following examples.

From Robert A. Heinlein's "Space Jockey":

The Commerce Commission has set the charges for the present three-stage lift from here to the Moon at thirty dollars a pound. Would direct service be cheaper?--a ship designed to blast off from Earth, make an airless landing on the Moon, return and make an atmosphere landing, would be so cluttered up with heavy special equipment used only once in the trip that it could not show a profit at a thousand dollars a pound! Imagine combining a ferry boat, a subway train, and an express elevator--

***
"Mass ratio...under power, the ship lost the weight of fuel burned. The thrust remained constant; the mass it pushed shrank. Getting back to proper position, course, and speed became a complicated problem in the calculus of ballistics."

***

Or these, from Arthur C. Clarke's The Fountains of Paradise:

He had seen that two-century-old film at least fifty times, and there were sections that we had examined frame by frame, until he knew every detail by heart. It was, after all, the most expensive movie footage ever shot, at least in peacetime. It had cost the State of Washington several million dollars a minute...

Vast, slow undulations, meters in amplitude, were sweeping along the entire width of the span, so that the roadway suspended between the piers twisted back and forth like an angry snake. The wind blowing down the canyon was sounding a note far too low for any human ears to detect, as it hit the natural frequency of the beautiful, doomed structure...

There stood the slim (too slim!) and graceful bridge, spanning the canyon. It bore no traffic, but a single car had been abandoned midway by its driver....

Suddenly, the supporting cables snapped, flailing upward like murderous steel whips. Twisting and turning, the roadway pitched into the river, fragments of the structure flying in all directions...In reality, it had lasted perhaps five seconds. At the end of that time, the Tacoma Narrows Bridge had earned an inexpungable place in the history of engineering.

***

Once again he was back at the Tacoma Narrows Birdge, but this time in a world of fantasy. There was a ship that had to sail beneath it, on a perfectly regular schedule. Unfortunately, the mast was a meter too tall...

No problem. Just before it was due to arrive, a few heavy trucks would be sent racing across the bridge at intervals carefully calculated to match its resonant frequency. A gentle wave would sweep along the roadway from pier to pier, the crest timed to coincide with the arrival of the ship. And so the masthead would glide beneath, with whole centimeters to spare...

And from Frank Herbert's Dune:

[W]e must start on standy-by water facilities at once. No man is going to hold a club over my head!

"It's a rule of ecology," Kynes said, "that the young Master appears to understand quite well. The struggle between life elements is the struggle for the free energy of the system."

"Each bush, each weed you see out there in the erg," she said, "how do you suppose it lives when we leave it? Each is planted most tenderly in its own little pit. The pits are filled with smooth ovals of chromoplastic. Light turns them white...But when Old Father Sun departs, the chromoplastic reverts to transparency in the dark. It cools with extreme rapidity. The surface condenses moisture out of the air. That moisture trickles down to keep our plants alive."

And lastly, from Larry Niven's Ringworld:

He took the holo print and looked into it.

At first it made no sense at all, but he kept looking, waiting for it to resolve. There was a small, intensely white disk that might have been a sun, G0 or K9 or K8, with a shallow chord sliced off along a straight black edge. But the blazing object could not have been a sun. Partially behind it, against a space-black background, was a strip of sky blue. The blue strip was perfectly straight, sharp-edged, solid, and artificial, and wider than the lighted disc.

"Looks like a star with a hoop around it," said Louis. "What is it?"

***

Sometime during these past hours, Louis had found a way to visualize the scale of the Ringworld.

It involved a Mercator projection of the planet Earth--a common, rectangular, classroom wall map--but with the equator drawn to one-to-one scale...But one could draw forty such maps, edge to edge, across the width of the Ringworld.

***

In suchwise, gifted science fiction writers convey a "sense of wonder," either about the nature of the universe, alien artifacts, or humanity's own future creations. Through simple but elegant gifts of prose, writers like Heinlein, Clarke, and Niven entertain, but also teach.