By Dana P Skopal, PhD
If you work in a technical area, you often need to write about the detailed technical concepts and their related processes. So what does this mean? If you are an engineer or scientist, you need to be able to explain your work to managers or a broad general audience. These explanations need to be clear and logical for your audience, who may not be technical experts.
Our research shows that if you can list those technical concepts as sound nominal groups (descriptive words around a main noun) with clear verbs and coherently link them across your sentences, then you are on your way to getting your message across. When writing, this can mean stepping back and re-defining or re-describing the things (as nouns) that you want your audience to understand. To clearly convey the technical aspects, it helps to understand your nominal groups as they generally describe the ‘who’ or ‘what’ (or technical concept) is doing the key technical action – something that a reader wants to know so they can follow your explanation.
An example of a noun group describing a risk is: the known risk of exposure to tritium contamination. The length is eight words, which is close to what our research showed was an appropriate length for a reader (six words).
A lengthy noun group describing the costs for a project is: the capital cost for the purpose of this checklist that is focused on supporting Infrastructure (15 words).
A lengthy noun group describing levels is: quite significant levels of activity that would translate into exposure to a large dose of radioactivity in extreme circumstances (19 words).
Ask yourself if the ‘what’ is easy to understand after one reading? Here the writer was describing the ‘cost’ or the ‘levels’.
Does the writer mean: the capital cost of listed infrastructure-support items (7 words)?
Are the levels: significant activity levels leading to major radioactivity exposure in extreme circumstances (11 words)? Could we write: significant activity levels, which would cause major radioactivity exposure in extreme circumstances (using a dependent clause)?
Maybe focus on building several shorter descriptions for your technical information and any related business case.
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