Beyond Letter Perfect
“There was a time when writing training was based on improving grammar and style, to communicate ideas with graceful words. While good writing still has these goals, two recent events have changed the way we train people to write in the modern workplace: the information revolution and the stress upon a quality-first business process.” Read more>>

Each year, Stephen de Paul trains
up to 1,000 engineers and other
tech staff how to do their jobs
better. Part of that teaching
involves ‘soft’ skills such as
writing and debating.
Photo: Jean Levac, Ottawa Citizen

When Entrust Technologies was working last year to finish a project with a major U.S. client, Kevin Marshall grew increasingly frustrated with an endless flow of e-mail and document modification.

The project, he felt, could have been completed in less time. The problem, he believed, lay in poor communication skills, inefficient e-mails and too much time taken to deal with documentation that was not crystal-clear the first time around. Marshall sent his staff on a training course to learn how to better write technical information.

“The ability to plan and communicate efficiently and effectively is a lost art,” says Marshall, manager of verification for Entrust. “It is one of those skills that has unfortunately taken a back seat to the latest technical products and programming languages, and yet it is the foundation for all customer interaction, all successful teams and all successful careers.”

The so-called soft skills in technology industries are getting more attention these days with a shift in the economy and a shakedown in the workforce.

“With everyone buckling down and battening down the hatches, a job becomes a matter of productivity and efficiency,” says Marshall, who manages the quality assurance team for Entrust’s technologies. “You can be more productive if you can do the entire job yourself, and that means you can design and develop technology but you can (also) write about it and communicate it.”

The sticking point, however, is that engineers are notoriously weak in dealing with plain English, a trait which has spawned thousands of jokes such as this one: You know you’re an engineer if your idea of good interpersonal communication means getting the decimal point in the right place.

Crucial Communication
Effective communication equals strong leadership, says Paul Walker, a senior vice-president of Conexant Technologies after a 20-year career coaching leaders of Fortune 500 companies. Written communication, talking one-on-one, speaking before a crowd and even giving presentations with good overhead charts all matter.

Walker takes communication skills seriously enough that he flew from Conexant’s headquarters in California to Ottawa earlier this year to address Ottawa university engineering students on the subject.

The Carleton University and University of Ottawa students were at a Hull conference, sponsored by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and devoted to soft skills needed in the workplace.

“The whole process of business is taking a notion and turning it into economic reality,” says Walker, whose company has a 7,000-strong workforce. “How you measure the perception of your employers, customers, investors in the stock market — it’s all in the realm of soft skills. It’s all in the realm of thought.”

Being able to communicate those thoughts are crucial, Walker says. At the universities, instructors agree.

“In our faculty, we have been emphasizing the need for these soft skills to our students on a regular basis,” says Tyseer Aboulnasr, U of O’s dean of engineering. “I tell the students that while their grades will get them the first interview, their communication skills and true understanding of the material they learned will get them the first job and will decide whether they keep it or not.”

She is not kidding. When Marshall sifts through a sheaf of resumes, he starts by screening out people who cannot express themselves well.

“Nothing — no products, no technology, no services — ever goes to a customer, at least from what I’ve seen in this industry, without adequate documentation to describe what it does, what the business case is, how the technology is going to work for end users,” Marshall says.

“I’d rather take somebody who is technically strong and may not know everything but who knows how to communicate properly. Then I don’t have to waste my time doing the reviews, getting out the red pen, correcting everything, sending it back with an e-mail to change this and that. I could be doing more productive things.”

The issue of soft skills has not been lost on the Canadian Engineering Education Board — part of the Canadian Council of Professional Engineers — which sets the requirements for engineering education guidelines in Canada.

A minimum 12 per cent of the required courses toward an engineering degree must be in humanities courses, which include communications skills and understanding the impact of technology on society, the dean adds. And every engineering program in Canada has a course on technical writing.

Stephen de Paul, a former part-time university teacher, says it’s still tough trying to convince would-be engineers they will spend a large part of their worklife writing.

De Paul, who has a PhD in English literature from the U of O, has turned his skills into a career to teach the tech community about writing and communications. In 1991, he left Northern Telecom to start his own company called WordTask. Previously, he helped organize a documentation writing group at Northern Telecom. Now, every year he trains as many as 1,000 engineers and other staff largely in the tech industry how to do their jobs better.

“They would be writing 30 per cent of the time and it surprises a lot of new employees in this industry. Even though they haven’t had a lot of background in it, they will still have be quite proficient and quite efficient in their writing. They have to be able to do it well and do it quickly.”

Too Much Jargon
The most common errors de Paul sees are long, overly technical e-mail in conversational style rather than in a business style that gets to the point first then builds a case to support the conclusion. As well, too many people rely on grammar-checking tools in software. They don’t understand syntax.

A particularly favoured technical-writing device is stringing nouns together to create impenetrable, incomprehensive jargon: Computer application training manual should be juggled around to computer training application manual.

“The thing is, you can alter the order of the nouns in the string to get a nice, long noun string and it sounds like you are saying something entirely different,” de Paul says. “It’s like a dialect and the more you are in it, the more you begin speaking it.”

“One thing our clients tell us is that writing ability is a very high priority in the high-technology sector, that your inability to communicate in writing can really limit your growth in the organization. Those people are going to have a tough go of it in terms of moving up the ladder.”

Engineering faculties throughout the country are highly aware of the advantages of having communication abilities, says Aboulnasr. Each year, a university sponsors the Ontario Engineering Competition — leading to a national competition — in which students are tested in categories from team design and presentation to explanatory communication of a technology before an audience of non-experts.

As well, the students compete in discussing issues related to technology, such as how it impacts, and is affected by, society. Aboulnasr is especially keen about a test in which teams of students are given a controversial issue to debate in proper parliamentary style.

Talking, debating, arguing your point well — all of these are strategic assets critical in marketing to investors and corporate top dogs.

“Technology is not just that narrow sense of nuts and bolts,” says de Paul. “If you are a designer and need to convince those around you that your approach is a better way of doing it, the strategic and persuasive elements involved with writing well in the workplace are not something that people have necessarily been taught. You can be more salable, especially if you want a vice president to invest in a product.”

Leadership, says Walker, is built by trust, being open and being able to communicate effectively. And in the business environment today, simply inventing a product or technology is no longer enough to guarantee success.

“The high-tech industry has gone through a wonderful 10-year period of growth where you’ve had a tidal wave of demand and what you really needed to do was take action and invent things,” Walker says. “Now that demand has softened in the industry, and the only way to grow your company both from an earnings and revenue point of view is to take market share or stimulate market share, it’s going to take a lot more thoughtful leaders and thoughtful companies to figure out how to do that.

“Teamwork is going to become more important, communicating the market windows is going to be more important and getting people to believe in you as a leader and your vision become more important so you can get to market before your competitors.”

For effective workplace training in writing skills, the unwritten objective increasingly is to free learners from their own sense of limitation, sometimes even an outright fear and loathing of writing. Beneath the mechanics of grammar, style, and structure lies the very human struggle to gain control over ideas and the confidence to advance them to a reader– without the anxiety and toil remembered from school days.

The writing instructor’s job is, therefore, more than transferring ideas, techniques, and even craft. It’s also recognizing that writing involves a degree of liberation from past lessons and present obstacles.
Remembrance of things past

“The super-consciousness of the rules is often
squandered on half-truths, at best.”

They show up in writing classes, vaguely uncomfortable, apprehensive: they are the graduates of the school of hard knocks. And now they’re expecting more of those knocks, dished up this time–they hope–with a little more compassion than they received years ago. Confronting these initially reluctant learners on a daily basis, a good writing instructor quickly adjusts to involve the adult student in a bit of unlearning before the transfer of any more substantial wisdom can begin.

The traditional aim of growing a literate generation of workplace writers sometimes seems to have come at a high price. Participants in training sessions on workplace writing sometimes arrive with an unhealthy fear of the wrong style, of transgression from the rules, and in general, of the writing process itself. In fact, their focus on the rules alone has eroded their otherwise instinctive sense of creative process. As many university professors have long noted, students of writing often seem surprised by the governing notion that good writing is a thinking process first and a compliance with the rules second.

What’s more, some of those “rules” that shackle these writers are not now–nor ever were–rules! The super-consciousness of the rules is often squandered on half-truths, at best. So, in the name of liberating us from the burdens of the past, here are some myths shattered:

You certainly can start sentences with “and,” “but,” or “because.”
To end a sentence with a preposition is not an offence.
The split infinitive can be your stylistic friend; do not fear it.
You don’t have to avoid at all costs the personal pronouns “I” and “we.”

No one is arguing that the rules are themselves outmoded or obsolete. But knowledge of a rule does not instill in a writer a sense of control over, or confidence in, his or her writing. It’s the process of getting control over one’s ideas that builds the confidence. The rules can shore up that confidence, but as static principles they can’t substitute for the dynamic process of thinking one’s way though the writing activity.

The power of precedence on the job

“Another source of weary precedence in the workplace can be the document template–a mixed blessing if ever there was one.”

Some of these burdensome notions still reign in the modern workplace under different guises. Workplace writers often assume incorrectly that the chain of command in the office is also the one-way pipeline to them for sound principles for writing. For example, many participants in writing workshops introduce themselves by stating that they want to “write like my manager,” never suspecting that, once back at the office, they’re more likely to be the authority on good writing techniques. It’s a seasoned writing instructor who can stress the proactive role of new-found confidence in a better approach that will effect change back at the shop.

Another source of weary precedence in the workplace can be the document template–a mixed blessing if ever there was one. In their intent, templates are excellent tools for consistency of message, format, and scope. But, in practice, templates can propagate bad writing across an entire organization. For one thing, the author of the template may have only a limited knowledge of document design, making every writer using the tool an accomplice to structural flaws. For another, the template removes control from writers, control that better resides with them than with the passive shell of the document.

Templates are valuable when they are used in a dynamic writing process that continuously validates document structure against the changes in the audience’s needs. In today’s business, such changes are rapid and frequent. Without this built-in flexibility of vision, the document template risks becoming an instant artifact for its users, condemning reader and writer alike to a view of the world as it once was. Can there be anything worse for the organization that desires to be seen as cutting edge in every way?

Writing training needs to be built–as the WordTask curriculum is built–on the changing demands of the workplace in which actual writing is done. The workplace is not school, after all; there’s not the luxury of endless dry runs with purely remedial corrections. Nor does it stay still long enough for writers to indulge in precedence for its own sake.

—

Stephen de Paul, Ph.D has worked with technical and administrative writers since 1985. He founded WordTask Information Strategies in 1991, and since then has helped clients in the private and public sectors with their communications skills and processes. His recent clients include Nortel Networks, Cognos Incorporated, MDS Nordion, EDS Systemhouse, and Bell Canada, to name only a few. Since 1980, he has taught part time in the Department of English at the University of Ottawa. You can contact him through his website www.wordtask.com

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There was a time when writing training was based on improving grammar and style, to communicate ideas with graceful words. While good writing still has these goals, two recent events have changed the way we train people to write in the modern workplace: the information revolution and the stress upon a quality-first business process.So while the basics of good written communication still hold true, workplace writing has become very much a case of “That was then, and this is now.” New techniques, built on those tried-and-true ones, now help workplace writers improve their effectiveness and their productivity.

Riding the wave of the information revolution

“Writing on computer, today’s workers can
unknowingly suffer hidden pitfalls.”

Rapid changes in the technology of writing have transformed the methods for teaching writing skills in the workplace. The use of information systems such as desktop computers, shared on-line files, and databases has altered our writing process notably.

For one thing, writing in the workplace, especially the technical workplace, has now become a system. Writing on computer, today’s workers can unknowingly suffer hidden pitfalls. Studies have shown that coherence of the text deteriorates when the writer is not aware of the splintering effect that the computer has on writing. In part, these defects occur, in a longer document like a report, because the writer can’t see the whole document, and consequently gets lost within it.

Another negative feature of computer-based writing is what is known as “circular revision”, the seemingly endless series of editing changes. As a consultant assisting organizations in the design of effective documentation processes, I once worked with a group of report-writers who routinely put their documents through no fewer than eight revisions cycles! Part of the problem was that these writers lacked effective criteria for revising documents on line.

In addition, the very subject matter of today’s workplace documents reflects the information revolution. Consider the various topics you write about in letters, memos and reports. If you’re like most people, the vast majority of these topics deal with technical matters such as the operation of equipment, user procedures for software, or inquiries about system bugs or breakdowns. Hence, writing nowadays requires a heightened awareness of the conventions for technical writing.

Technical writers have much to offer us in techniques for clear procedures, technical descriptions, and fast, easy movement through difficult material. Because today’s writing community in both the private and public sector demands it, most of my seminars, even those dealing with traditional “business writing”, routinely possess some component devoted to technical writing conventions.

Making your writing “quality-sensitive”

“At each phase, the writer can troubleshoot
defects early in the writing process, often
before the draft is even written.”

Current quality drives in business include such initiatives as ISO 9000 certification, business process re-engineering, and continuous improvement. Underlying all of these approaches is the common requirement that your work process measure its own efficiency and the effectiveness of its output. If you don’t work inside a measurable process, you never know if you have satisfied clients or customers.

Applied to writing, this awareness of process has particular meaning. A good writing process has four measurable phases: planning, design, drafting, and revision. Unfortunately, many workplace writers spend as much as 80% of their time drafting and as little as 10% planning and designing their documents. Consequently, their documents fail to meet readers’ needs. As well, these writers often spend a long time over a draft that is defect-ridden from the start.

The preferable approach is a “quality-sensitive” process, one that, at each phase, produces an output, a deliverable, whose quality can be measured objectively. Once aware of the process, writers spend 50% or more of their time on planning and design phases, and only 25% of the time drafting. With this shift in effort, overall writing time shrinks, and document quality increases. At each phase, the writer can troubleshoot defects early in the writing process, often before the draft is even written.

The result of these two trends — the change in the writing technology and the need for a quality writing process — is that dotting the “i’s” and crossing the “t’s” are givens. More than being letter-perfect, business writing now benefits from specialized, yet easily learned, techniques for communicating in the modern workplace.

—

Stephen de Paul, Ph.D has worked with technical and administrative writers since 1985. He founded WordTask Information Strategies in 1991 (www.wordtask.com), and since then has helped clients in the private and public sectors with their communications skills and processes. His clients include Nortel Networks, Cognos Incorporated, MDS Nordion, EDS Systemhouse, and Bell Canada, to name only a few. Since 1980, he has taught part time in the Department of English at the University of Ottawa.

• may expresses permission or possibility
• can expresses ability

While we can often get away with the mistaken uses of these words in speech, always check them when you are revising your document.

May for permission or possibility
May has two different meanings when used with a main verb, as illustrated below.

Examples:
My manager replied to my email with a terse refusal: “You may not take this afternoon off. Sorry.”
(This use of may denotes permission, or in this case a denial of permission!)

According to the forecast, it may rain tonight.
(In this context, may denotes likelihood or possibility.)

Can for ability
Can denotes the ability to do something, as these examples illustrate.

Examples:
The employees in Tim’s group can be very resourceful when they need to be.

Camels can go great distances without water.

The system can fail under these circumstances.
(Notice the difference in meaning between the sentence above and this one.)

The system may fail under these circumstances.
(In the first sentence, the system is capable of failing. In the second, there’s a distinct chance that it will.)