Minimalism

Quick-Start Guides Require a Minimalist Mindset

The point of a quick-start guide is, as the name says, to help the users get on their feet as fast as possible. This requires the writer to ask, “What is the absolute minimum that someone needs in order to get started?” The next best question is “What is the user going to do the most often?”

Minimal Procedure Content: Reasoning

The procedure I wrote about creating a Twitter list uses abbreviated content. This post describes the reasoning behind and decisions made in writing the topic.

The RoboColum(n)

With in excess of ten years front line authoring experience and many more producing training documentation, I have a passion for language, its use and its odities. I was an Account Manager for a computer bureau providing a service to the advertising industry prior to taking the plunge into technical authoring. A large part of this was the production of technical training material for the ad-hoc customer training and classroom led courses held in the company’s training suite.

Minimizing Documentation

Is less always more? I’m not sure. But if Apple’s minimalistic designs are any indicator of trends, minimalism in documentation is something to pay attention to. Here are five ideas for minimizing documentation.

Minimizing Complexity In User Interfaces

Clean. Easy to use. User-friendly. Intuitive. This mantra is proclaimed by many but often gets lost in translation. The culprit: complexity. How one deals with complexity can make or break an application. A complex interface can disorient the user in a mild case and completely alienate them in an extreme case. But if you take measures first to reduce actual complexity and then to minimize perceived complexity, the user will be rewarded with a gratifying experience.

Keep It Simple: Streamline Your Documentation to Make it More Effective

Are we giving users the help they need, in the way they need it? Go minimal.

Three Tweets for the Web

The relative decline of the book is part of a broader shift toward short and to the point. Small cultural bits—written words, music, video—have never been easier to record, store, organize, and search, and thus they are a growing part of our enjoyment and education. The new brevity has many virtues.

A Strident Defense of Mediocre Formatting

Formatting automation removes cost from the process of creating and delivering content. For technical documents that change often and are perhaps delivered in multiple languages, it removes a lot of cost. Essentially, we can produce documents inexpensively and give more people access to them as a direct result of lower cost, or we can climb on our typographic high horse and whine about word spacing. I’m with the noisome fanboys.

Duct Tape Technical Writers

In reality, the user just wants a brief, clear explanation of a concept or task. The user will glance and skim — reading behaviors hardly worthy of the elitist grammarian who argues the finer points of “which” versus “that” in restrictive clauses.

Can You Design Your Way to a “No User Documentation” Approach?

For simple, commonly known actions in a closed environment, you probably can design your way to a “no user documentation” approach. Good design can also lead to less documentation. However, customers may expect to do more than that with a product and, in those situations, documentation can play a key role in meeting those expectations.

Simplicity Trumps Complexity….Mostly!

One of the tips for creating a help project is to keeps things simple. This applies as much to the content as it does to the manner in which it is produced. The tool used to produce it has a big bearing on how simple the documentation process is of course but sometimes you just have to bend the rules.

Sometimes, Simple is the Way to Go

I’m advocating boiling the documentation down to the essentials. Remove any superfluous material. Tell the user how to do things with a piece of software or a gadget, not what that something can do. You might wind up with documentation that’s just a set of procedures connected together by linking material and cross references. Don’t bog them down with what’s not necessary for them to get things done in a fast and efficient way.

More Tips for Writing Well

Be vicious when you edit. Vicious. Follow these recommendations with zealous fervor. They help your writing say what it should in a way we’ll understand.

Plain English Is the Best Policy

The health care reform bill now under consideration in the House of Representatives includes a proposal that certain disclosures in insurance policies be made in “plain language.” Another piece of legislation now being considered by both houses of Congress would likewise require uniform and simplified coverage information, much like what’s required on nutritional labels. These are excellent proposals, but they do not go far enough. Plain-language disclosures of some policy information and consumer-friendly labels are no substitutes for making an entire policy readable.

The Minimalist Principle: Omit Needless Things

Minimalism is something people might strive for, but they don’t know where to start.

Write Everything as if Writing for the Web

Writing tightly means packing the most information into the least amount of space. It's not easy, but when you do it, the result is like magic. The key to being an effective writer is to keep what you’re writing short, to the point, and easy to read. Like the best writing on the Web.

Cut, Cut, Cut your Content and Procedures

Sure. We’ve been reducing word count in procedures for some time. It’s time to do more, however. As noted in an earlier post, we have to think mobile. Think small screens and small devices. Screen real estate will be at a premium.

The Myth of Simplicity and Complexity in Help Authoring

Although simplicity is a noble ideal, and something like “simplify complexity” could be the mission statement of any technical writer, simplicity is in fact a complex undertaking. The interplay between simplicity and complexity is what technical writing is all about.

Making Content Understandable: Inherent Usability in Plain Language

Using an example from his personal life, Haller shows how government writing should be simplified to ensure that a reader can understand government documents. He also discusses the importance of passing the Brayley Bill, the plain language bill.

Seven Interface Design Techniques to Simplify and De-Clutter Your Interfaces

What is simplicity? Simplicity is the quality of being natural, plain and easy to understand. It is not surprising then that simplicity is often thrived for in user interface design. Most people naturally dislike complexity in devices and software. Yes, some people find joy in figuring out how something works, but for most of us, being unable to operate a device leads to wasted time and frustration, and that’s not a good thing. If you can take a complex device or a piece of software and somehow rearrange, reorganize and redesign the interface to make it easy to use and understand, then you’re well on the way to delivering a better user experience. In this article I’m going to talk about 7 practical techniques that you can utilize in web design to make your websites or web applications simpler and less cluttered.

Writing Global English

Unfortunately, there seems to be no such thing as simplicity-checking software - even remotely like the description above. Audience Dialogue tried to persuade a few software developers to make their fortunes by writing this software, but with no success so far. In the meantime, there are a few widely available tools to use.

Speed Up Your Web Pages

Do you want faster-loading Web pages? Learn how you can make the browsing experience better for dial-up users by reducing loading times by as much as 80 percent, in some cases.

Professionalizing Plain Language: A Postcard on Current Developments

With the passing of the Brayley Bill in Congress, the significance of plain language has become even more apparent to technical communicators. The author lays out a step-by-step plan to maintain the relevance of plain language as an important and necessary profession.

Short and Simple Sentences

When you’re writing for the web, try to keep your sentences under 20 words in length. Your content will be easier to read this way. This is because it’s easier to read a few short sentences than it is to read one big one.

Hyped Web Stories Are Irrelevant

The fads and big deals that get the press coverage are not important for running a workhorse website. To serve your customers, it's far better to emphasize simplicity and quality than to chase buzzwords.

Plain English

According to Plain English Campaign (www.plainenglish.co.uk), plain English is "… something that the intended audience can read, understand and act upon the first time they read it. Plain English takes into account design and layout as well as language." Many organisations have found that plain English brings commercial advantages.

Beyond Plain English

Plain English is good for increasing the quality of written documents. Unfortunately, it has limits in many technical situations. We need a special form of language, known as a controlled language, to overcome those limits. One particular controlled language is ASD Simplified Technical English.

Tools and Techniques for Working with Subject-Matter Experts to Create Plain Language Manuals

This paper discusses tools and techniques for editors and writers who need to work with subject matter experts (i.e., engineers, programmers, accountants, etc.) to create plain language manuals.

The Almighty Thud

If you document everything, you are giving everything an equal weight. Do that for a complex system, and you are buried in detail. In any system there are some aspects that are more important than the others, key aspects of the system that once understood, will help someone to learn more. The art in documentation is to find how to document these aspects as clearly as possible. In this you emphasize these areas, and leave the details for the code.

Clear, Brief and Bold: Will Strunk’s Legacy

A masterpiece of concision so tightly written that you almost don't need to read past the table of contents.

Fixing the Flaws in the Ten Principles of Clear Writing

More importantly, most lists of ten principles of clear writing are not really principles at all, but rather tips and technique. Understanding why you are doing something, i.e., the benefit you will gain, helps ensure that you will actually do it and do it consistently. Too often, when we are told only what to do, we follow the instruction half-heartedly, inconsistently, or not at all.

The Basics of Plain Language

The purpose of this lesson is to introduce the basic concepts of plain language.

Overcoming Word Inflation: The Benefits of Minimalist Design

Writers are great inflators. We can take a simple half page describing a computer interface and in a few hours transform it into a 35-page document complete with glossaries, type conventions, overviews, introductions, mission statements, charts, clip art, and copyright pages full of disclaimers, trademark acknowledgements, and credits. The results will make the people in marketing and sales simply glow.

The Plain Language Process: Steps for Effective Writing

Effective writing does not come by chance. The creation of all documents, including forms, labels, websites, business letters, legal notices, manuals, procedures, reports, and proposals, usually involves the following key steps.

Politics and the English Language

If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation, even among people who should and do know better.

Writing for Dollars, Writing to Please

Call it the benefits of plain language. The literature contains studies about these benefits, but no one has ever collected and summarized the studies in a way that makes their full force apparent. As you read the summaries in this article, try to imagine the costs of poor writing — typified by officialese and legalese — in business, government, and law. The costs are almost beyond imagining, and certainly beyond calculating. If this evidence doesn't convince organizations and individual writers that plain language can change their fortunes, probably nothing will.

Simplicity in Your Mind

This article postulates that we cannot address the issue of simplification exclusively by analyzing the physical and computational parameters of technology. Instead, we must understand the goal of simplification in light of the knowledge, tasks, and processing-load demands on its users. We can approach simplicity as an engineering endeavor by controlling the impact on these three usage dimensions.

Strunk and White Were Wrong: In Speechwriting, Personality Should Not Remain in the Background

A speech generally needs personal language because it is delivered by a live human being whose words should not sound, as Wabash College Professor William Norwood Brigance put it, "like an essay standing on its hind legs."

Writing Government Policies and Procedures in Plain Language

Ask ordinary citizens for an example of unreadable prose, and half of them will show you a government document; the other half will point to something written by a lawyer. As a government lawyer for more than 30 years, I wrote and reviewed safety regulations and technical policies and procedures for a major federal agency and eventually supervised other lawyers who did the same. Although I never met a technical document I didn't have the urge to rewrite, I always thought that what my fellow lawyers wrote was pretty clear. Then the plain-language movement came along, and I found I had a lot of room for improvement.

AECMA Simplified English

ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English (formerly AECMA Simplified English) is a specification for writing aircraft documentation. The principles can be applied to all industry sectors. ASD-STE100 provides a set of writing rules and a dictionary of words and their meanings. It has a limited number of words; a limited number of clearly defined meanings for each word; a limited number of parts of speech for each word; a set of rules for writing text. This article outlines the standard, and shows how it helps to prevent ambiguity in text.

To Draw and Hold Readers' Attention, Apply a Hollywood Technique

Find the one thing you want people to remember as you write a posting for a Web page, a subject line for an e-mail or a headline for a newsletter.

To Be or Not To Be

During this workshop, To Be or Not To Be, the workshop presenters demonstrate how getting rid of the verb 'to be' increases accuracy, clarity and effectiveness in verbal communication. E-Prime originated in the field of general semantics; it consists of the English language, but excludes all forms of the verb 'to be.' Practitioners in the field of general semantics have developed a number of techniques that promote clear understanding of communication in the world around us. The workshop presenters strive to create an environment for participants to learn the philosophical background and practical application of the English language subset known as E-Prime.

Design Critique: On Plain Language

An interview with Whitney Quesenbery about minimalism and plain language in user experience design.

Reducing Complexity in Documentation

With more emphasis being placed on customer satisfaction, technical writers need to focus on information strategies that will lead to happier customers. The complexity of the information is one common complaint of customers. Writers need to understand what customers think is complex. Then, writers need to develop strategies to combat these complexities.

Minimalist Strategies for Improving User Documentation

Those who use our products often ignore our best efforts at good documentation because they prefer to explore and learn by trial and error. Several researchers have developed document strategies that might help our users explore, learn, and recover from their errors. In order to use these strategies, however, technical communicators must get to know their users better, prototype their documentation, and test it on their users. Researchers need to tell us more about active learners and strategies for meeting their needs.

A Study of Instructions for Information Systems: Variations on a Minimalist Theme

To perform complex tasks, workplace computer users have to know how to control their programs and adapt program capabilities to the needs of their job goals and methods. I inquired into the instructional information that will help users learn such adaptive computing for complex data processing tasks by interviewing twelve experienced database users and analyzing twenty-five exchanges between experts and users on a database helpline network. Findings show that instructions may help users emulate expert approaches to adaptive computing for complex tasks by providing enough substantial technical information to help clarify task problems, goals, methods and analogies and presenting it in the form of rules of thumb, general procedures, and task-to-program explanations.

Get Rid of the Babble

Try to rid your writing, especially business writing, of unnecessary words. They take up space, look impressive only to naive readers, and say nothing.

Advocating Plain Language: Thom Haller Discusses The Need For Clarity

Plain language is clear, concise, and straightforward presentation of information. It is professional content structured to eliminate ambiguity and confusion in technical, government, and legal documents. Plain language allows readers to fully comprehend complex regulations, practices and instructions by requiring the language of bureaucracy to reflect the language of everyday speech.

Style That Economizes Mental Energy

Perhaps the most important feature of good writing style for scientific and technical communication is economy: writing that reduces the mental labor of the reader or user. I describe the principle of "conservation of mental energy" as developed by Herbert Spencer and extended by later studies in readability and psycholinguistics. Stylistic techniques that make reading easier have powerful application to the prose crafting that sci/tech communicators do every day. The idea of conserving mental energy, or being "efficient" in communication, gives us a touchstone for thinking about good style and a rationale for explaining why it's valuable.

Achieving Minimalism through Interactive Multimedia

Use interactive multimedia with text-based online documentation to achieve the minimalist model pioneered by instructional design guru John Carroll. Non-linear modules of 'real' tasks help users get started fast, and quickly learn from any errors.

How Important Is It To Streamline Communication

Today's organizations must contend with increasingly complex communications environments that feature a wide array of communications methods. Employees, business partners, and customers communicate with one another through infinite combinations of phones, voice messaging, e-mail, fax, mobile clients, rich-media conferencing and other communication gadgets. One thing that is very important is proper communication. Whether you use the age-old snail mail or an email, the key to success lies in effective communication. One should get clear message as to what exactly is required or told by you. It is very important to streamline communication whether you are conversing in person or through an age-old snail mail, email or over the phone.

The Nurnberg Funnel by John M. Carroll

In the Nurnberg Funnel: Designing Minimalist Instruction, John Carroll presents some helpful ideas based on some useful research on how the initial self-instruction (often called 'tutorials') should be developed and written.

Calculating Documentation Cruft

It's easy to describe documentation cruft, and often easy to identify it once you see it, but it's hard to estimate how 'crufty' a document actually is. Furthermore, it's often hard to convince the creators of a document that 'their baby' isn't as beatiful as they believe it to be.

Plain Language in Science: Signs of Intelligible Life in the Scientific Community?

'The importance of the work is inversely proportional to the number of people who can understand it' is an outdated attitude in today's scientific arena. The trend toward plain language is gathering force in government, academe, and scientific journals.

The Passive Voice and Social Values in Science

This article claims that two social values in science--falsifiability of science and cooperation among scientists--determine use of passives in scientific communication. Scientists do not always develop valid theories, so scientific experiments must be amenable to being repeated and found invalid. This requires that the experiments must not be discrete events. Science is also a cooperative enterprise. As an integral part of science, scientific writing employs more passives than actives to focus on materials, methods, figures, processes, tables, concepts, etc. Use of passives to focus on the physical world helps de-emphasize discreteness of scientific experiments. Besides, it also helps remove personal qualifications of observing experimental results. Finally, it enhances cooperation among working scientists by providing a common knowledge base of scientific work--things and objects. Looked at in this way, the passive voice in scientific writing represents professional practices of science instead of personal stylistic choices of individual scientists.

Plain English in Corporate Disclosures: Review and Implications for Consumers, Producers, and the Free-Market System

The Internet is revolutionizing the investment world. There are clear benefits to these changes, including lower costs and faster access to the market for investors. There also are consequences to these changes when investors take risks without having access to clear, accurate, and full disclosures. In a free-market system, investors must have access to information they can understand and use autonomously to have full and equal access to the investment market. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) recently passed a rule requiring businesses to use plain English to try and rid disclosures of their traditionally complex and ambiguous language. However, SEC's rule only addresses the front and back sides of prospectus disclosures. Consequently, the success of plain English will depend on the writer and business using it. Public corporations committed to using plain English will empower investors with the information they need to participate in the market freely and safely. In return, businesses will create a more effective and efficient free-market system by maximizing utility, benefiting producers, consumers, and the market as a whole.

The Plain Style in the Seventeenth Century: Gender and the History of Scientific Discourse

This article analyzes the statements on plain style made by Royal Society writers and seventeenth-century women writers. Using scholarship in feminist rhetorical theory, the article concludes that Royal Society plain stylists constructed scientific discourse as a masculine form of discourse by purging elements that were associated with femininity, such as emotional appeals. The article also discusses how women writers, particularly Margaret Cavendish, embraced a plain style more out of concern for their audience than out of a desire to eliminate undesirable feminine attributes. The implications of this historical study for understanding of current practice are noted.

Simplicity Is Highly Overrated

I am in favor of good design and attractive products. Easy to use products. But when it comes time to purchase, people tend to go for the more powerful products, and they judge the power by the apparent complexity of the controls. If that is what people use as a purchasing choice, we must provide it for them. While making the actual complexity low, the real simplicity high. That's an exciting design challenge: make it look powerful while also making it easy to use. And attractive. And affordable. And functional. And environmentally appropriate. Accessible to all. That's why I like design: it presents wonderful challenges.

Simplicity: The Distribution of Complexity

Achieving simplicity is not that simple when you are dealing with complex modern device design. Rob Tannen mused on lazy shortcuts, artificial constraints and Maeda's crusade on the complex.

A Mathematical Theory of Communication

The article entitled 'A Mathematical Theory of Communication', published in 1948 by mathematician Claude E. Shannon, was one of the founding works of the field of information theory. Shannon's paper laid out the basic elements of any digital communication.

How to Create a Site Where Users Can Actually Find Information: Interview with Thom Haller

Thom Haller, information architect and director of the Center for Plain Language, talks about how to create a site where users can actually find the information they're looking for.

The Complexity of Simplicity

Though many business strategies and publications continue to trumpet the power of simplicity in the design of digital products, for lots of companies and product teams, simplicity doesn't come easy.

The Golden Rule

Everything that goes into your web site must have a purpose. Every single element and decision must help users achieve their goals and support the site's goals.

Simplicity

Simple web design delivers huge benefits to designer, client and user. When a design doesn't seem to work, ask what should be taken away before asking what's missing.

Simplicity

Simplicity as a result of a creative process is 'the ultimate sophistication,' as Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) said. Achieving simplicity is a difficult task not only in web-design but in every discipline (art, business, sports, science), yet simplicity for websites is a particular challenge as paper derived graphic design and usability on one side, marketing language and user expectations on the other side are in constant struggle with each-other.

Keep your Web Pages Simple

Simplicity is probably the most important underlying factor when it comes to the performance of any web page...whether it be your home page, an interior page, a sales page or a landing page. Here are six ways to keep your pages simple, and increase conversions.

Dogmas Are Meant to be Broken: An Interview with Eric Reiss

With training in everything from stage design to Egyptology to hypertext games to web projects, Reiss has had extensive practice in finding out what makes an experience work. Could these be the principles I've been waiting for? I tracked down Reiss in Vancouver to find out.

Putting the White Back in Strunk and White

In web design screeds, the most commonly cited book is not what you might expect. It is not by Jakob Nielsen or Jeffrey Zeldman or Edward Tufte. It's not even on design or typography or code. It is a thin volume of guidelines on writing by a professor 'at the closing of the first world war' and treasured by one student enough to put it into print. William Strunk was the professor, and E.B. White, author of Charlotte's Web, was that grateful student. White took the master's set of laws, removed some 'bewhiskered entries,' corrected some errors, and added his own chapter at the end for 'those who feel English prose composition is not only a necessary skill but a sensible pursuit as well.'

The Elements of Style for Designers

What if E.B. White had written 'Hanging Commas 99% Bad' instead of a gentle list of reminders for young writers? Wodtke outlines how White's list of 22 reminders for writing can be just what young designers need.

Simplified Technical English: STC Should Take the Lead

Proposes that STC become involved in brainstorming ideas about Simplified Technical English, thus leading the way for clear, correct documentation.

Write English the Way You Write Code

For a profession full of sharp people, software engineering produces some hideous prose. How many times have you tried to read a technical document and failed because it was, in a very real sense, unreadable? It doesn't have to be this way. We technical types can improve our writing simply by applying some of those hard won coding skills to to those other, human, languages. I may be grammar challenged and spelling incapable, but writing code has taught me a few things about writing for people.

Clear as Mud: The Plot Thickens

A lot of the time, management-speak simply seems ridiculous. But campaigners for plain English say there is a more serious side to the issue.

What is Plain English?

Over the last two decades, a â€˜culture of clarityâ€™ has been gaining ground in many large organisations around the English-speaking world. In the United Kingdom, government departments, banks, insurance companies, local councils and others have come to realise that clear communication is actually a good idea. Instead of writing to impress or confuse, they are now writing to inform and explain. They are using plain English to do this.

Conciseness is Key to Good Technical Documentation

One of the most important and difficult parts of technical documentation concerns writing in a concise manner. Technical writing is different than writing fiction or magazine articles, where a mood may be set or--in some cases--where space must be filled. (People seldom buy thin books.)

Usability Professionals’ Association Urges Consideration of Plain Language

The Usability Professionals’ Association (UPA) wishes to express its support for plain language.

"More is Less" for Many Home Entertainment System Users

The days of a single remote for the TV or cable box are long gone. Like ants at a picnic, the control pads have invaded the nation's coffee tables. But unlike ants, remotes evolve rapidly. Not only are there more, but many sport added buttons and complexity added each time a model is upgraded with new features.

But, Having Said That, ...

A persistent rule of thumb in the programming trade is the 80/20 rule: '80 percent of the useful work is performed by 20 percent of the code.' As with gas mileage, your performance statistics may vary, and given the mensurational vagaries of body parts such as thumbs (unless you take the French pouce as an exact nonmetric inch), you may prefer a 90/10 partition of labor. With some of the bloated code-generating meta-frameworks floating around, cynics have suggested a 99/1 rule—if you can locate that frantic 1 percent. Whatever the ratio, the concept has proved useful in performance tuning.

Usable Regulations: Legislation Pending in U.S. Congress

On March 1, 2006, witnesses testified before the House Government Reform Committee’s Subcommittee on Regulatory Affairs. Their testimony supported what plain language and usability experts have long known: Clear, concise, easy to understand regulations will save the government (and taxpayers) time and money.

Text Clarity Blog

A blog about clearly communicating your message.

The Paper Mountain Goes Online

Ample research has proved that companies can save many thousands of dollars by rewriting key documents in plain English. Poor communication on the Web and intranet are squandering the time and money of many an organisation.

Engineering Terms in Plain English

Twenty terms from engineering writiting translated into the vernacular.

The Great Myth That Plain Language Is Not Precise

Occasionally, when you try to convert from legalese to plain language, someone will come forward and assert that you made a mistake. You missed something in the translation. You inadvertently changed the substance.

High Tech Humor

The remarkable growth of the information technology industry has created a tremendous opportunity for people with skill putting words on paper. Technical writers, once a rare and highly skilled position, are now as common as fruit flies—though they take up a lot more space. Yet the pay is pretty good considering how little work they actually do, so young English-major weenies desperate for employment continue to swarm around IT companies, hoping for a bit of rotting fru—er, looking for a plum position.

A History of Plain Language in the United States Government

Awareness of the need for clear language isn't new in the US government.

Nine Easy Steps to Longer Sentences

Are you tired of short, direct, and simple sentences that seem to take forever to fill up a page? Are you paid by the word? In either case you can benefit by increasing the number of words in your sentences and the bulk of your writing. And it's easy if you just follow nine simple steps, many of which you may already know and practice.

Scientists Need Plain Language

Expresses concisely why scientists need to use plain language when they write for the public.

Signs of Intelligible Life

Looks at a number of institutions that are finding ways to insert plain English into communication between scientists and the public, as well as among scientists of different disciplines.

Wanted: Articulate Scientists

This article outlines the benefits you can realize by articulating your science clearly and succinctly; next time, we'll look at how and why several academic and government institutions as well as some publications are encouraging this trend.

Writing Effective Letters

Always start by putting your main message up front. Some people feel that bad news should be buried. But research shows that readers will always look for the bottom line.

Writing Reader-Friendly Documents

The traditional way of writing government documents has not worked well. Too often, complicated and jargon filled documents have resulted in frustration, lawsuits, and a lack of trust between citizens and their government. To overcome this legacy, we have a great responsibility to communicate clearly.

So You Want a Website: Tips for Diving into the Internet Ocean Without Getting Drowned

Practical advice for anyone trying to find a good web designer. A few semi-technical topics, but mostly plain English pointers.

Minimalism

Links to resources about the Minimalist Model applied to documentation and training.

Minimalism and Documentation

What is minimalism? Is minimalist documentation 'risky,' and if so, what can be done to mitgate the risk? Was the structure of Windows 95's Help based on John Carroll's Minimalist Model or was 'the result' more a Microsoft business decision -- or a bit of both?

Plain English Campaign

Plain English Campaign is an independent pressure group fighting for public information to be written in plain English.

Adopting Minimalism in a Corporate Environment

Minimalism is more a methodology or set of principles than a set of measurable qualities. In order for your writers to move to a minimalist approach to documentation, you must be able to explain what you mean by the term and what you expect from your writers.

Designing Minimalist Principles Into User Interfaces

Designing a user interface using minimalist principles for guided exploration can reduce the amount of paper and text necessary to document the system. Graphics in the interface can help the user grasp the concepts of the system, while dialog boxes, status information, and error messages can aid in recognition of success and recovery from errors. Online help can then be used as a backup for users if they get stuck. Reducing text and paper can reduce translation and printing costs, making this process very attractive.

Good Legal Writing: of Orwell and Window Panes

George Orwell once wrote that `[g]ood prose is like a window pane.' What I take Orwell to have meant by that remark is that when people read good prose, it makes them feel as if they've `seen' something more clearly.

Downsizing Documentation: Meeting the Challenge

The redesign of the Microsoft Windows operating system along with a shrinking page count and Help file-size allocation, presented Windows User Education with a unique opportunity. We not only redesigned our entire documentation model, we also changed and improved our authoring tools. And, along the way, we changed how we did our work.

Using a Plain Language Assessment Tool to Improve Business Communication

Our company has been involved in a joint public/private sector initiative to bring the benefits of plain language campaigns to business communication. For the project we developed a plain language assessment tool that identifies problem documents, estimates costs associated with poor documents, analyzes their usability, profiles their authors and readers, and helps create action plans for improvement. Two organizations have run pilot projects with the assessment tool, and we did follow up research on them and on some organizations that were exposed to the tool in a workshop setting. The tool is an effective vehicle for improving business documents and performance.

The Zen of Minimalism: Designing a Top-of-Class Manual for Beginners and Advanced Users

Can using minimalist documentation improve accuracy and learning speed for beginners as well as for advanced users? I tested this question using Microsoft Access for Windows 95 ® and three different third-party manuals explaining this product. Then I set up three main tasks for the user in a usability test. For each task, I provided the task description in blue type, and then copied the appropriate documentation in black. Documentation for each of the three tasks was reprinted from a different book.

A Critical Assessment of the Minimalist Approach to Documentation

Carroll's (1991) minimal manual has been considered an important advance in teaching first-time users the basics of computer programs. Unfortunately, it is not very clear what minimalism really means. Practitioners, for example, will find it difficult to create their own minimal manual because the principles of minimalism have not been described in enough detail (see Horn, 1992; Tripp, 1990). It is also not yet settled that a minimalist approach is the most effective one because critical experiments have hardly been conducted. This study therefore closely examines the minimalist principles and claims. This paper describes the basic ideas of minimalism, its design principles and how they can be operationalized. A parallel is drawn between a minimalist and constructivist perspective on learning and instruction. Like minimalism, constructivism places a high value on experience-based learning in context-rich environments. Like minimalism, it stresses the need to capitalize on the learner's prior knowledge as much as possible. And like minimalism, constructivists urge learners to follow their own plans and goals, to make inferences, and to abstract principles from what they experience (see Duffy & Jonassen, 1991, 1992). An experiment is reported that examines the claims of minimalism. Strong and significant gains on several factors were found, all favoring the minimal manual over a control (conventional) manual. The discussion points to several issues that minimalism has yet to address.

From Plain English to Global English

Make your documents easy for EFL users to read and understand, and communicate successfully with people all over the world. About one billion people use English as a foreign language (EFL). You can avoid most pitfalls of cross-cultural communication by using global English.

Answering the Critics of Plain Language

Plain language has to do with clear and effective communication -- nothing more or less. It does, though, signify a new attitude and a fundamental change from past practices.

How To Write Well

The phrase 'Plain English' (although widely used) is a little misleading. It is nothing to do with the English language as such. The principles outlined here apply to writing in any language. A more accurate expression is 'plain language'.

How You Can Make Plain English Work for You

Plain English is good, clear writing which communicates as simply and effectively as possible. But it is not a childish or simplistic form of English.

Plain Language: What Is It?

When you reach out to your readers, you show that you have considered who they are and what they need to know. Communicate a concern for your readers' needs so they will be receptive to your message.

Speaking in Tongues

Last month I stated this is not a place for jargon. I felt that was important enough to call out. I certainly am being called to task for that.

Effective Writing, or Tips on How to Write English 'Gooder'

Some quick tips toward a clearer, more lucid, meaningful,…well, you know what I mean.

An Application of the Principles of Minimalism to the Design of Human-Computer Interfaces

Minimalism in information design, specifically as applied to user tutorials and manuals, was introduced in the early 1980s through the work of Dr. John M. Carroll, then a cognitive psychologist at the IBM Watson Research Center. Since that time, theorists and practitioners have further elucidated the principles of minimalism and have attempted to apply it to a variety of situations in which people attempt to learn how to use a software application. Most recently, a new exposition of minimalist principles and practices was published by MIT Press. This work, Minimalism Beyond the Nurnberg Funnel, represents the work of leading theorists and practitioners in the field.

Deadwood Phrases

Deadwood phrases are found in all types of writing. In technical writing they are to be avoided at all costs as documentation needs to be crisp, concise and accurate.

Writing to Reduce Information

When creating online and hardcopy information for software, technical writers tend to be prolific. Every piece of information is important, isn't it? And more information means happier users, right? Not every piece of information is necessary, however, and users don't want more information. Instead, they want the right information with easy access to it. This panel discussion describes why you, as a technical writer, need to reduce information and how you can reduce it by incorporating the following techniques and activities into the writing process.

Removing Unnecessary Words

Using an extended example, this article shows how it is possible to reduce the number of words in a text and at the same time increase readability.

Making the Invisible Visible: Process, Inspiration and Practice for the New Media Designer

Hillman Curtis' minimalist approach to design also appears to be his approach to writing. In just a few words he captures the essence of what it means to be a New Media designer and what it takes to push into unknown territory.

Clear Writing: Ten Principles of Clear Statement

If you want to test the clearness of your writing, you may wish to consider using a 'fog index.' Fog indexes measure the complexity of writing samples, and often provide a means of calculating the reading or educational level required to understand a particular passage. Some fog indexes are available as computer software programs, or you may do the calculations yourself.

Apple Help and John Carroll's Minimalism

This report gives a brief overview of minimalism, a description of an Apple Computer documentation project, and a summary of my findings. It also provides some of my and my Apple colleagues' recommendations to improve both the user's experience and that of the instructional designers working to write Apple Help content. Through the course of this report, I will provide support for my hypotheses that (1) the current Apple Help model is not a minimalist help system, but that (2) users of most Apple software would not be well served by such a system anyway.

Participles Becoming Prepositions--Some Arcane Information for Editors

A presentation that accompanies the paper of the same name at http://webhome.crk.umn.edu/~mpringle/UsingPaper.rtf.

Participles Becoming Prepositions--Some Arcane Information for Editors

In English, some participles have already become prepositions. The author noticed in her work as a technical editor that most of her writers seemed to perceive the participle 'using' as a preposition already although it is not listed as such in the dictionary. The paper gives the evidence and rationale for making such a claim. It offers a window on written language change in progress and celebrates the language user’s ability to make the stolid dialect we call technical writing more vigorous and efficient by turning a participle into a preposition.

Applying Minimalist Principles, Strategies, and Techniques

People use documentation differently from what we might expect. They don’t like to read; instead they jump to a task with prior knowledge, and sometimes don’t realize they’ve made an error. Understanding how users learn and applying John Carroll’s minimalist principles will help provide solutions to this problem. Documentation that has been successfully planned and designed for minimalism may take longer to create than other manuals, but reaps the benefits of making users more productive and happy, while reducing support calls, maintenance, translation, and publishing costs. The key factors to a successful minimalist approach (or any good documentation design) are a keen understanding of your users, prototypes designed to match tasks relevant to users, and iterative testing to improve each draft.

Needless to Say

The needless repetition of words and the repeating of ideas is everywhere - in newspapers, books, magazines, e-mails, television, and even in conversation. They’re called redundancies and the English language is full of them. In fact, research shows that about 50 percent of English is redundant.

Editing to Help Students' Backs

Perhaps the worst way to condense a book is by using smaller or condensed type; you want to be especially careful that all fonts are legible. Neither should you save space by tossing out pictures or diagrams that clarify subjects. Some engineers cram paragraphs together, but paragraphs are valuable structural devices that can make subjects more clear. So the clue to successful condensation of text is not mechanical miniaturization but literary efficiency.

Plain Language Writing: From a Good Idea Emerges Good Public Policy

Peter Zvalo looks at the plain language movement, its promoters and its critics.

From Gobbledygook to Plain English: How a Large State Agency Took on the Bureaucratic Form Letter

In an effort to reduce phone calls and improve customer service, the Washington State Department of Labor and Industries(L&I), in July 2001, launched 'Plain Talk' – a year-long project to rewrite 100 bureaucratic form letters into plain English. Hundreds of thousands of form letters are used each year by L&I to process claims, to issue workplace safety and health citations, and to handle many other workplace issues. As the Plain Talk project manager, I decided to focus on the department’s highest-frequency form letters and now work with 12 programs to rewrite them into clear and simple language. The effort is backed by a strong message from the governor and agency director, high-quality training, ongoing mentoring, and “reality check” usability testing. The project is due to be completed by the end of June 2002.

Arthur Levitt and the SEC: Promoting Plain English

Intercom's assistant editor profiles a recent recipient of STC's President's Award. The Securities and Exchange Commission was honored for requiring plain English in all disclosure statements filed with the SEC.

Sentence-Style Revision

Problems involving sentence-style cause writing to be unclear, wordy, unemphatic, and difficult to read. But sentences with these kinds of style problems are not necessarily grammatically incorrect—--nor do they violate any of the commonly accepted standards of usage. Yes, perfectly wretched, unreadable writing can be perfectly error-free! Federal, state, and local government—as well as academicians and lawyers in general—have long been the primary resource for wordy, pompous, and just plain bad writing. However, with the Plain English Movement, William Clinton's 1998 Presidential Memorandum on Plain Language, and similar events in state and local governments— government writing is becoming less and less an easy target. This chapter reviews some of the most common sentence-style problems, showing how to recognize them and how to fix them. Surely many others exist —we've just not trapped and labeled them yet. But in the wilds of bad writing, being able to recognize and revise sentence-style problems covered in this chapter will take you a long way—and enable you to recognize other types of problems as well.

A Humanistic Rationale for Technical Writing

A discussion of how to argue that technical writing has humanistic value. Reviewing the common belief (at least in 1979) that tech writing was of necessity a 'skills' course, this article counters the traditional 'plain style' rhetorical theory by suggesting possibilities for professional and theoretical alternatives for the field.

Simplified English Roundup: Fait Accompli or Impossible Dream?

The increase in the number of products with accompanying documentation sold around the world has shown the need to develop some form of controlled English guideline. Simplified English is just one type of controlled English. The apparent benefits of writing in controlled fashion has led some to consider it a panacea. Others, however, have urged caution in accepting controlled English as the solution to all problems in the comprehension of documents. All forms of controlled English have certain essential features that any technical writer can accept.

Focus on Simplicity

An IBM Ease of Use poster with the message 'Focus on Simplicity.'

Keep It Simple

An IBM Ease of Use poster with the message Keep it Simple.