President’s Message:
Communication is a wonderful thing…when it works

by Debbie Kerr, President

As technical communicators we all get cocky and assume that we know how to communicate, when sometimes nothing could be further from the truth. Don’t get me wrong, when it comes to explaining how something works or documenting a process, I would want a technical communicator on my team every time. The problem is, we are all human, and there are areas that we have to check and recheck, no matter who we are.

The following are my suggestions on how to communicate effectively. Think of them as my own personal list of lessons learned.

Get a second opinion

There is a reason that this saying is so important, even when it’s not in a medical sense. No two people think exactly the same way, so it is critical that you have several people test your instructions. While you believe your instructions to be totally clear, you could be mentally correcting a problem every time you read them over. The more you test and re-test your documentation, the more likely it is to be understood by most of your audience. If best-selling authors have editors, why should you be above having someone else taking a look at your work?

Just walk away

Walking away from something works in so many situations. It doesn’t just work when you are going to say something you will regret later; it also works when you have been struggling with the wording of a sentence, trying to get it just right. Sometimes the best action is inaction. Walk away from what you are doing, and the sentence or paragraph that you were trying to force together will suddenly work itself out.

My husband always asks me, “What ’cha thinking?” And I tell him that I’m working on my article. Sometimes I wonder if my husband feels as weird as the guy on TV, whose wife wakes up in the middle of the night with another prophetic dream. While I don’t sit bolt upright in bed and say, “I’ve got the sentence!” I do sometimes fear that it might be the next step in my writing process.

Reread your emails before you send them

While emails help to speed up communication between people, they can also cause problems.

As technical communicators, we are accustomed to being direct and concise. When you are sending email to people who may not know you, the clear concise writing tone that you use in documentation can come across as terse, rude, and even condescending. I found this out the hard way, when I dashed off a quick message to someone just before I went to bed. I didn’t check the email for its tone, and, because the person didn’t know me, they were offended by it. The quick email now required a second and longer email to explain the miscommunication.

Email can be a breeding ground for miscommunication, especially since there is no voice inflection or body language to go with the words. If there is another way of reading something, try to state that you don’t mean the other way. It’s sort of a “head them off at the pass” approach.

Another problem with emails is that they have become so commonplace that people take them for granted. It’s often this familiarity that causes people to get too comfortable with their wording. People often make mistakes in emails that they wouldn’t make in a memo. Treat email like a memo, and check it for grammar, spelling…and tone.

Get on the same page

As technical communicators, “getting on the same page” is one of our favourite lines. During the course of a project, we gather people together for meetings to make sure that what we believe we communicated clearly on paper is what everyone truly got from reading that document. The different thought processes that make us unique are also what make it difficult to ensure that we are reading and interpreting words the same way. This is what makes our jobs truly challenging and rewarding, and demonstrates why it is a lot harder than it looks.

We all have different experiences and backgrounds so that even words like car, house, and mother create different images in our minds. People interpret text based on their own perspective. For example, about a week ago, I sent an email to a person whom I hope to meet at the STC Annual Conference. Both of us acted as judges at the International Technical Publications Competition (ITPC), but our only communication has been through emails and teleconference. She suggested that we meet at the reception on Sunday, May 7, at 8:00 pm.

Since my family has not been on a big vacation, we are going to spend a few days before and after the conference on a family vacation, so I indicated that my family would be at the hotel with me. While I meant this a way of saying that I might not be going to the reception, this other person interpreted my email as a way of me asking if my family could attend the reception. Since I never even considered taking them to this event, it never occurred to me that my email could be taken this way. On looking at my original email, I could see that I didn’t clearly state that I might not be able to make it to the reception, because I was spending time with my family at night; I just said that my family would be with me.

Once you realize that your perspective isn’t the only perspective, the effectiveness of your communication has nowhere to go but up.

Repeat information and ask others to repeat instructions

While we are taught that repetition is redundant, that is not always the case.

When you receive a request by email and think you understand what it says, repeat the request back to the sender using your own words. By doing this, you are confirming that you got the message and that you understood the request. If your response was not what the original email intended, you have the opportunity to get immediate feedback. This is better than finding out halfway through the project that what you were doing was not what was expected.

The same holds true if you have asked someone to complete a task. It is better to have the person repeat the instructions back to you in their own words. This way you know for sure whether the person understands what task you have asked them to do. By doing this immediately, you don’t find out days later that the person didn’t really understand what you wanted. This saves time and effort on everyone’s part.

Strive to improve

As kids, we talked into Styrofoam cups with a piece of string between them and we could hear each other. According to our childhood standards, communication was “working”, simply because we could hear each other.

As adults, we need to remember that just because we are talking to each other or sending email back and forth, there is no guarantee that the communication is “working” or that we couldn’t find ways to improve that communication. When a communication mistake occurs, look at it as another opportunity to learn. But don’t feel you have to wait for a mistake to be made. As technical communicators, we are always striving to find ways of improving processes. Look to correct problems before they become mistakes.

In sharing some of my mistakes learning experiences, I hope you can learn from them too.

About Debbie Kerr (President)

In the 20 years that Debbie has been writing documentation, she has worked in a variety of industries: government, retail, software, and insurance. She is currently employed at The Economical Insurance Group in Waterloo, where she has stepped out of her traditional role of writing user guides and help files, and now writes a variety of specifications.

Debbie has been a member of the STC since 1994 and has been a council member for many years. Most recently she was The Quill editor for two years.