I am in the midst of reviewing a document from a colleague. It purports to be a user guide for a Quality Control process. Sadly, it is lacking quality itself. Microsoft Word thinks it is written on a fifth grade level (my third grade daughter is producing writings at a higher level); it is fraught with grammatical errors (yeah, I make them as well, but that is why we use a draft-review-edit life-cycle. Thank you Writing in the Arts and Sciences and the Writing Center at Beaver College/Arcadia University). I digress (or was it the ADD, I'm not sure). If there is a style in use, that too, is elusive. Maybe it is hiding with the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot and Elvis.
Today's business writings, be it technical manuals, inter-office communiques, CEO blogs, scientific articles, etc., seem to have moved from carefully crafted literary experiences to SMS messages (uh, text messages, my bad!) or Facebook posts. I cringe when I read many of these documents. The use of monosyllabic words and lack of vocabulary represented by these educated authors is appalling. Maybe a technology-only education is not as all encompassing as advertised. The failure to be able to effectively communicate ideas, decisions, and information can make even the most technically elegant advancement ineffective.
Apple, for years, failed to communicate effectively the efficacy of it's systems, how the ease-of-use could translate into increased productivity and a higher return on investment (or ROI, for you jargon jockeys). Now, Apple has found a new voice in communicating this, be it in the iPod, iPhone, iPad or MacOS, and as a result, sales are up, as is market share. Despite offering technically superior products for most of the past 25 years, Apple could never communicate beyond the simplest levels these advantages.
Before anyone accuses me of being a Mac fanatic, I must confess an affinity to Apple's products. Most of the time, they really have the best products, but there have been innovations Apple failed to exploit, and still does (can you say camera on the iPad?). At one point, the Amiga was actually a superior product to the Mac, but Commodore (the NY Mets of personal computing) managed to under communicate the advantages. Android is no slouch (I use an Android phone, and love it), Ubuntu is a great OS, WinAmp and Pandora are great music sources, etc.
Yet again, the point is about effective communications, not a soapbox to praise Apple. If we are to effectively communicate, we need to make it easy for our reader to capture the ideas we implant with our words, to draw mental images of the scenarios we relate, and replicate the steps we follow to build towards our goals. Go, Dog, Go! is great when we are learning to read, but we eventually need to head to the tree, and climb into a world of new ideas, creating a more vivid picture of what we imagine, so our readers may come away with useful information for the task at hand. It could be an alien landscape, a relationship on the verge of collapse, or the set of instructions on how to run a program to check data quality. If the words we choose are effective, then the possibility of success is increased.
Success, ultimately, is dependent on the reader. If the brain bank is unable to handle the deposit, there is no amount of eloquence or clarity that will make the endeavor a success.
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