As a technical writer, I was used to writing about complex, technical subjects. Often my audience was more technically savvy than I was, so I didn't have to dumb down my material; the challenge there was knowing what really mattered to my audience. Other times, I was writing for non-technical end-users, which made my task more difficult.
Writers who are writing about science and technology for a popular audience, such as a newspaper or magazine, face the same challenge. Nicholas Booth is a British author who has been writing about science and space for many years. Last week, he was writing for the People of Space Twitter account, which presents a different person each week writing about a space-related topic.
Here he's compiled a long Twitter thread into a single post about how to write about complex and technical subjects for a non-technical, popular audience. There's some good advice here that should be relevant for technical writers too.
Most people aren't numerate. Indeed most people are SCARED of mathematics because they either do not understand it or simply even see what math is all about. For scientists and engineers, that forms a fundamental problem in explaining what you do,
The point is this: if you say a launch velocity is 17,500 miles an hour, it doesn’t mean anything. If you say 7 miles a second, it does. That's from here to the next town in the blink of an eye.
What you are also doing when you are explaining something - making it understandable - is providing context. You are adding meaning to what you are being told.
If you say there is a resonance frequency is at 15MHz, what does that mean. Is it a good thing? A bad thing? Was it a surprise? Or did it confirm what you were thinking when you did the work?
No comments:
Post a Comment