The combining of requisite technical knowledge with requisite writing ability is addressed. Considerations in the development of in-house writing courses, in-plant training, are presented and evaluated. Specific problems in past methodology are also detailed. It is suggested that teachers of technical writing should be technical people themselves, preferably with working experience in industry or business; the training provided should be user-oriented, not theory oriented

Lane, J. C.

English

NASA Technical Reports Server

WHYS AND HOWS OF IN-HOUSE WRITING 
John C. Lane 
Ethyl Corporation Research Laboratories, Detroit 
I regret that I must write my contribution to this panel rather than 
participate in person, This is particularly regrettable because I have not 
had the opportunity to hear the related panel this morning and the present 
panelis other participants this afternoon. Thus, I may overlap or seem to 
ignore important points made in both panels. If so, please excuse me - - it 
will be inadvertent. 
To get as much into the spirit of this discussion as  is  possible from 
1200 miles away, I've studied the abstracts submitted by the panel's other 
members. From time to time, 1'11 comment on some of their ideas. 
I suppose there's no maxim that doesn't have an invalidating excep- 
tion. Nevertheless, Iim going to advance one formulated by the late Norman 
Shidle years ago, when he was editor of the SAE Journal, The SAE, of course, 
i s  the Society of Automotive Engineers - -  which, although engineers arenit 
supposed to be able to write, has long managed to be articulate, if not liter- 
ate. 
Norm's maxim is, and I quote verbatim: "Clear thinking must pre- 
cede clear writing. " He maintained, and so do I, that the best writer in the 
world can't write clearly about something he doesn't clearly understand. 
We can combine the requisite technical knowledge with the requisite 
writing ability in only two ways. 
1. We can teach engineers to write, o r  
-
2. We can teach writers to engineer. 
Of the two, I believe it i s  easier to teach engineers to write. So that's what 
I do. 
I agree wholeheartedly that in-house courses are  not the only way to 
accomplish the task. The earlier you catch the little devils, the better the 
training will stick. And that, I believe, is part of the reason why so much 
in-house training i s  needed today. The job just didn't get done earlier. 
Grammar-school teachers, years ago, used diagraming and syntax 
to teach coherent sentence building. They also taught their little charges to 
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.jsp?R=19820008116 2020-03-21T09:51:18+00:00Z
outline before starting to write. To some extent, anyway, the outlining step 
provided the clear thinking that must precede clear  writing. 
Then came the progressive, free-expression, e r a  that believed one 
way i s  a s  good a s  another. Reading was taught by the look/say, whole-word 
method. Students could no longer sound out a written word to determine if 
they had heard it before. As a research professor at Georgia Tech in the 
ear ly  1950s, I had graduate students working for  me who couldn't recognize 
the names of chemicals that they could step into the lab and synthesize with 
ease, 
High- school English teachers largely ignored composition, because 
study of contemporary writing styles was more fun - - and a great deal easier  
- - to  teach. "Me now, I just wanna be a catcher in the rye o r  a lo rd  of flies. l1 
College composition courses were taught by English teachers on the 
Liberal Arts  side of the university. Matriculating engineers were given qual- 
ifying tests  that might opt them out of such tltime-wastingtl courses - - as ,  
indeed, I was. 
In those days, the saying was: "Writers a r e  born, not made. l1 And, 
I submit, that was because few teachers, if any, knew how to make a writer.  
Then, in the 1940s, two curious men asked what makes writing clear 
o r  unclear? Why do some writers make even simple ideas hard to under- 
stand? And why can others make very complex ideas reasonably understand- 
able even to laymen? 
One of the questioners was an Austrian refugee, Rudolf Flesch, who 
came to this country not knowing how to speak o r  write English. He taught 
himself how to speak by going to the movies and matching the visual action 
with the sound track. In other words, he learned the English language the 
same way a l l  of us here learned it - -  by osmosis. He literally absorbed it -- 
which i s  no small t r ick  when youlre already grown up. 
The other questioner was Robert Gunning, who went to work for a 
Columbus, Ohio, newspaper after being graduated from Ohio State University. 
As a reporter  whose writing was extraordinarily clear,  he was asked to con- 
tribute items to a most unusual new newspaper. It was named "My Weekly 
Reader," and its a im wasto bringworldwide news to junior-highstudents and, 
thereby, stimulate their desire to read - - in other words, to give them some- 
thing to read above the Dick-and- Jane o r  Bobbsey Twins level. 
A few newsmel?, like Robert Gunning, could write clearly for teens 
and subteens. But most could not. Gunning wondered why not. In another 
part of the country, and f rom different background and experience, so did 
Rudolf Fle s ch. 
Within a year o r  so of each other, both men developed readability 
indexes. They analyzed the parameters that make writing unnecessarily com- 
plex. Because of its simplicity and i ts  computer-proved relationship to the 
years of schooling required to read with comprehension, Gunning's Fog Index 
formula has been more widely adopted than Fleschfs formula. In fact, it has 
become a very useful yardstick for determining whether a piece of writing is  
unnecessarily complex. 
Do sentences ramble on and on, without the pause of a comma or  
period, so that the initial idea i s  forgotten before the final idea i s  proposed? 
To avoid this, Gunning made average sentence length a prime parameter in 
his Fog Index. 
The other prime parameter is use of unfamiliar, complex words. 
Why, a s  Mark Twain said, write "metropolis" when I get paid the same for 
calling it "city1'? The same, of course, goes for "approximately" versus 
"aboutu; "characterize" for "describe "; "proximate" for "near "; "diminu- 
tion" for "drop" o r  "decrease" -- and any number of other multisyllabic 
pomposities for more familiar synonyms. 
Some people write to impress rather than express. Usually, this 
shows through, and the impression is unimpressive. 
One of Gunning' s ten principles of clear writing i s  "Relate the com- 
plex to the simple. " An example might be electric voltage and current, which 
nobody can see,  to water pressure and water flow. If one wants to express 
how large a "black holew in space may originally have been, he might t r y  
comparing it with the diameter of the sun, which a l l  of us see  every day. 
0, there a r e  many ways of teaching writing. And I maintain that 
most of them have been ignored in recent years by English teachers trying to 
educate the scientifically oriented people who will develop andguide our tech- 
nological progress in years to come. That's really not the English teachers1 
bag, and they probably shouldn't be saddled with it. 
So who should do the job? Lf it hasn't been done before the graduates 
a r e  cast out into real  life, then business and industry must supply what the 
educational system has not. 
That, very briefly, i s  the case for in-house training. If the educa- 
to rs  haven't done the job, the employers must. 
Out of my own company's need in the early 1950s, I sought out Robert 
Gunning at  a hotel symposium he was conducting in Cleveland, Ohio. Hun- 
dreds came, one o r  two men per company, to take Gunning's one-day course 
in  major metropolitan a r ea s  around the country. 
What we wanted at our Laboratories was to t ra in  scores of research- 
e r s  to report their results clearly and concisely. At two or  three hundred 
dollars a researcher,  in the hotel format, that would have taken years  and 
cost a fortune. 
So we asked Gunning if he would come to Detroit and give his course 
in-house to al l  of our people who needed to communicate in writing. He 
agreed, and together we set  up what was either the f i rs t  o r  one of the f i r s t  
of his in-plant courses. 
Over the years, we came to realize that Fog Index and the Gunning 
ten principles of clear writing still  left us somewhat short of truly effective 
communication. 
One major problem was thought organization - - something Gunning 
didn't much consider. An important corollary was determining the primary 
audience and i t s  particular needs and non-needs. To whom a re  you writing 
and why? What do they already know? What more do they need to know? 
How do I best relate what they nked to know to what they already know? And 
how do I avoid confusing them by telling them more than they need to know? 
These a r e  questions, I believe, that most college and univer sity peo- 
ple have not asked themselves. Therefore, we employers have been forced 
to ask ourselves. The results have been in-plant training courses. We don't 
do it  to put English teachers out of work. We do it because the job hasn't 
been getting done. 
One problem has been that the neophytes never bring the payoff bot- 
tom line up front in the reports of their efforts. I think they got that way be- 
cause of their education, not despite it. And the fault l ies not with the Eng- 
lish faculty, but with the technical faculty. 
Consider what a technical-faculty member looks for  in his students' 
reports. The prof probably has been assigning the same laboratory experi- 
ments to successive classes for years on end. His purpose i s  to instill ex- 
perimental abilities - - not to obtain an answer he already knows. Therefore, 
a s  his students soon perceive, the way to get an A i s  to report chronologically 
- -  and in detail -- every manipulative effort and technique employed, step- 
by-step, in conducting the experiment. At the end - -  and only at the end -- 
do you divulge the result. 
Then the students graduate and a re  hired by result-oriented com- 
panies. Their abilities to conduct experiments and employ scientific techni- 
ques a r e  tacitly assumed from their degrees and resume's. Now the emphasis 
i s  on results. The bottom line of their college reports now i s  of top-line im- 
portance. Somebody, somewhere, has to convince them that the way to earn 
an A has shifted 180 degrees. Of necessity, this part of their education has 
fallen to the industries and businesses that employ them. You can send them 
out to remedial courses, o r  you can do the job in-house. Of the two alterna- 
tives, in-house usually i s  better, faster,  and cheaper. 
Very briefly, that's the case for in-house training. It supplies what 
hasn't been supplied by academia -- at least up to now. I think it can be sup- 
plied in school. But to do so, teachers a r e  going to have to consider the real-  
life needs out there -- consider what employers need and want, not what the 
faculty has been awarding with A's. 
This leads me to ask where the snobbery that Mr. Ransome alludes 
to really lies. Is it in the engineer who i s  unwilling to communicate, o r  i s  it 
in his'writing mentor who believes the engineer can't communicate. Believ- 
ing that engineers have hairy ea r s  and suffer from tunnel vision and intellec- 
tual  snobbery is a gross misinterpretation. Truth is ,  they just don't suffer 
fools willingly. The savant who comes along and tells them they a re  saying 
it al l  wrong had better be sure he knows how to say it right. "Clear thinking 
must precede clear writing. 
That is why I believe that the teachers of technical writing should be 
technical people, themselves , preferably with working experience in industry 
o r  business. The training they provide must be user-oriented, need-oriented 
- - not theory-oriented. 
In the abstract of his talk here today, Dr. Smith said the student 
should be taught to use words precisely rather than quote "writing like he 
talkst1 unquote. Personally, I fail to see how, why, o r  where those two tech- 
niques a r e  mutually exclusive. A per son brought up in a home of reasonably 
educated parents learns to speak well before learning to write at all. And the 
clear thinking that must precede clear writing i s  done in the brain, not on 
paper. 
Gunning's ten principles of clear writing include "Develop your vo- 
cabulary. l t  The reason i s  not so you can use the word "paradigmIt when you 
mean ttexample" o r  lrrhinitis't when you mean the common cold. Gunning be- 
lieves that the more words you know, the more clearly and precisely you can 
think. When you have completed the clear-thinking step, you then translate 
your precise thoughts into the simplest, least complex verbiage for the broad- 
est, least specialized audience you wish to reach. . . . To do less than that 
is ,  in itself, a kind of intellectual snobbery. 
Einstein once was asked for a thumb-nail explanation of the theory 
of relativity. His answer went something like this: "When a man sits on a 
hot stove, a minute seems like an hour. But when he sits on a swing with a 
pretty girl, an hour seems like a minute. It all depends on where you are. 
That1 s relativity, 
With that as an example, and in the interest of keeping things rea- 
sonably brief and to the point, I now conclude. I send you greetings and best 
wishes from Detroit, and I sincerely regret that I'm not able to be with you 
today. 


Whys and hows of in-house writing

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

NASA Technical Reports Server