Technical Communication

In the latter-half of the 15th century, a German fellow came up with a rather remarkable concept. He set individual Latin characters into rectangular dies of a standard size, assembled them into rows, and secured them in place in a wooden frame. He coated the raised letters in ink and pressed the entire contraption against a sheet of paper. This was the birth of movable type and the modern printing industry, thanks to Johannes Gutenberg.

Blogging about Cats

The incredible ease by which we can now produce and share reams of information with people all over the planet comes with a great responsibility. Publishing is cheaper and easier than ever, but writing is still difficult. Most of the world's musings used to echo away almost instantly, but expontentially more of our conversations and idle daydreams have been set into digital ink. "More people", states Cory Doctorow excitedly, "are reading more words from more screens than ever before." I don't share his enthusiasm, as this unchecked braindump may be doing more harm than good. How important is it for posterity to record countless volumes of sloppy, angsty teenage poetry on MySpace or blog about your cats? More is being written, but less of it is any good.

Writing and Reading

Communicating complex technical concepts is doubly-compounded by this modern world. The sheer volume of systemic dependencies required for me to key this essay is unreal; dozens of interweaving layers of software and hardware interplay at every keystroke. So, not only is there more crap out there for readers to wade through searching for a literate or useful needle in the haystack, but the work and knowledge required to produce the needle exceeds that required of our predecessors. Technical communication is not only hard, it's harder than ever.

I must also mention the other half of the writing problem: readers. As everyone in the software business knows, nobody reads the manual. I'll submit my own corollary to this aphorism. "The more painstakingly detailed the spec, the less likely it will actually be read." We barely communicate with users or among eachother. Most technical reference texts are terrible. We are facing a dramatic surplus in information but a dangerous deficit in content. Trouble abounds.

Our Only Hope

There is a silver lining to this cliché. We can learn to write and read better through practice and discipline. Even catblogging may have bright possibilities.