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MAKING TECHNICAL REPORTS UNDERSTANDABLE' DWIGHT E. GRAY The Johns Hopkins University, Silver Spring, Maryland
L o m RAYLEIGEis said to have been one of the &st scientists to point out the fallacy of assuming that once a bit of technical information has been written, it is "known." Information can be so described only if the back of the old envelope, the stone tablet, the paper, or the report on or in which it appears is both available and understandable. Making and keeping technical reports available is today a problem of increasing complexity, involving all the complications inherent. in the bibliographic control of written and printed information in any rapidly expanding field. Making technical reports readable and understandablethe topic of this paperis equally important; availability without understandability gives a report a degree of vitality equivalent to that possessed by "faith without workskS.)' A discussion of the understandability of technical reports should, perhaps, be prefaced by some consideration of the more fundamental problem of whether technical reports are worth writing a t all. Do they warrant the time, effort, and expense required to prepare them in readable, presentable form? To be convinced that this question deserves an affirmative answer, it seems to me, one need only ask and answer the further query, "What does a research laboratory produce?" In an automobile factory, labor, and raw materials are consumed and automobiles come off the assembly line (I refer, of course, to the classical or theoretical automobile factory). The research laboratory assembly line delivers a certain number of material objects and prototype gadgets, but certainly its major product is increased knowledge packaged for the ultimate consumer in the form of technical reports. Consequently, a technical report that no one can understand has essentially the same value to its r e c i p i e n h n d the same effect on the reputation of the organization which produces i t a s an automobile that no one could drive would have. A major objective of science is the discovery of a relatively small number of fundamental principles in terms of which large numbers of experimental facts or natural phenomena, a t first apparently unrelated, can be described or explained. When I adopt a similar approach in trying to analyze and relate the numerous specific shortcomings that turn up in first, and too often in final, drafts of the technical reports I read
(and write), I always seem to arrive a t the same basic principle. It is that most of the style and structural faults of technical reports result from the author being so concerned ,with what he i s writing that he neglects to worry enough about hozv and for whom he i s writing it. This failure to give sufficient attention to how the message is to be tailored for the consumer leads technical authors, I believe, to commit three principal sins: 1. They do not organize their material logically. 2. They overindulgesometimes to the point of intoxication-in obscure phrasing, polysyllabism, and the use of idle words. 3. They tolerate gaps and open switches in their arguments. The first of these, illogical organization of material, probably results chiefly from the author making a poor division of his preparation effort between the mental and the muscular. There is a natural tendency t o feel that one is "writing a report" only when one is exercising his arm and hand muscles with pencil or typewriter, or his jaws and vocal cords in dictation. Actually, one of the best ways for an author to insure the readability of his technical report is to begin its preparation by spending a comparatively large amount of time sitting and thinking. During this period of recumbent ratiocination he should ask himself such questions as: 1. Exactly what do I wish to repait? 2. What boundary conditions are imposed by technical or other considerations on the material I wish to report? 3. For what kmd of reader am I preparing this report? 4. What must I give this kind of reader in the way of background to enable him to understand the report? 5. What are the principal points I wish to emphasize? 6. What sequence of presentation will best enable me to emphasize these points?
Once he has answered in some detail these and similar questions, the author is in a position to organize his material in a logical, easy-to-follow manner. (It is assumed, of course, that a t some earlier time he has answered a5rmatively the question, "Have I anything worth reporting?" As one faces the deluge of technical reports that pour out of and into research laboratories
' Revision of a paper presented before a Conference on the Administration of Research held by The Pennsylvania State College, October 8-7, 1947. 226
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these days one occasionally wonders if authors are have its surfaces more nearly a t the same temperature being sutliciently firm with themselves on this point.) than would exist a t the same points if the intervening Somewhere in his consideration of organization the material were steel." The idle-word fault is exemplified by statements such author should decide upon a sensible title. I have in mind two reports received in our laboratory within as, "We have made progress in so far ss that we a t The meaning would have been recent months; one is called "Fmal Report on Item least recognize. No. 2" and the other "The Most Important Research conveyed better and six words cheaper by, "We have Work of the Last Time and Proposals about Reports made enough progress to recognize. Another Still to Be Written." A sensible title probably falls actual example reads, "I must make it plain, of course, approximately halfway between the above extreme that further tests are necessary for the simple reason examples of the "title noninformative" and the four- that. ." What the author meant and what he or five-line kind that approach being abstracts. wasted twelve excess words to say was simple, "Further The tendency toward excess polysyllabism, obscure tests are needed because. . ." phrasing, wheels-within-wheels sentence structure, and Gaps and open switches-my third category of style idle words is like certain diseases; we all carry the fault-are just what the terms imply. The reader germs about with us, most of us succumb to occasional may he riding along smoothly and comfortably with attacks of varying severity, and with too many of us the author's train of thought when suddenly he enthe malady is chronic. One can't help suspecting at counters the language equivalent of a missing section times that scientific writers use a special edition of the of track or unbridged canyon. True, the track usually Century Handbook-one that carries a small appendix, picks up again on the other side hut the reader is not found in the regular edition, which reads, "Under supplied with no structural material to use in bridging no circumstances use a one- or two-syllable word if a the gap. Or, without warning, the reader may find six- or seven-syllable substitute can he found." that the author has neatly switched him off on a blind Reasons for this apparently natural human bent toward siding in the argument and provided no right of way the ornate and intricate in technical writing are un- by which he can return to the main line. Discondoubtedly numerous and complicated and would tinuities of these kinds occur most frequently when a require psychiatric search to sort out. They probably report is written solely by the individual who did the involve, among other things, exhibitionism, mental experimental work being reported, and result largely laziness, literary infantilism, and uncertainty in the from the author's failure to put himself in the position author's mind as to just what he wishes to communicate. of the reader. The report reads logically and the Whatever their causes, authors' indulgence in these argument has continuity to the man who wrote it practices prevents technical reports from being written because, as he goes along, he unconsciously supplies in their proper language, plain English. I heard re- missing rails and builds absent bridges from his firstcently of the perfect answer to that irritating question, hand knowledge of the experiment. The best remedy "What's the matter, can't you understand plain for this difficulty probably is careful review of techEnglish?" In this case the query was flung by the nical report manuscripts by persons other than the author of a letter a t a colleague who had questioned author, regardless of whom he may be. I suspect it its readability. The critic's answer was, "Certainly; is impossible for any individual, reading a report he that, however, does not appear to be the vehicle you has written about work he himself did, to divorce are using." Most of us can understand plain English completely his experimentally gained knowledge from but too often we employ some other vehicle when we the material actually in his paper. This "gap and open switch" problem is one of the reasons I write. Two or three illustrations may be of interest. The favor a routine in which the research 'scientist or following sequence of words is presented as an e x a ~ p l e engineer writes the first draft and a member of the of a sentence that isn't a sentence. (It is exactly as it technical reporting staff handles the rewriting. The appeared in a technical report except for several noun latter individual ideally should have enough scientific substitutions made in the interests of security): "Hav- background to permit him to read the report intelliing been requested by the Weather Bureau to make use gently but should not he a technical expert in the field. of its standard thermometers, of which there is an Preparation of the final draft of the report then becomes abundance at the present time, and to refrain from a kind of literary damped oscillation in which the making extensive changes in the thermometers them- manuscript bounces back and forth, with decreasing selves, this I think we have done in a fairly simple amplitude, between the research man and the technical writer, until the latter is satisfied with organization manner." The next example, which is a single sentence that and style and the former agrees that technical accuracy appeared quite without benefit of punctuation, might and completeness have been maintained. All of the above emphasis on how the technical he entitled "Saying It the Hard Way." "This is due to the f a d that when there is a steep temperature message is to be "prtekaged" is not intended to detract gradient in the steel the higher conductivity of the from the importance of what is being reported. The gold causes it to have a much lower gradient for the latter clarly is paramount since it constitutes the resame total rate of heat flow so that a layer of gold will port's principal reason for existence. The relative
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importance of "what" and "how" varies somewhat with the nature of the report's probable readers. At one extreme is the highly technical report, written by one expert in the field for the exclusive, or almost exclusive, use of other experts in the field. Here the "how" is perhaps of least importance, or-I would prefer t o say-lack of proper attention to it does the least damage. Readers of such a report are already well versed in the technical field under consideration; they will usually be able, therefore, to fill in most of the gaps and will not be too badly handicapped by poor organization. As a last resort, of course, they can always corner the author at the next sectional or national meeting of their particular learned society. At the other extreme is the technical report prepared primarily for readers who need general and background information but who are not experts in the field. I n this case I believe "how" a t least equals and perhaps exceeds "what" in importance, because unless those for whom the report is written are able to understand it, writing it a t all is pointless. I would like to illustrate these two kinds of report by describing briefly the formal series of technical documents issued by the Applied Physics Laboratory of The Johns Hopkins University and its associate contractors. These reports are prepared in connection with the Bureau of Ordnance, guided-missile project in which this family of laboratories is commonly engaged. The documents fall naturally into two groups which, although not at the extremes mentioned above, are appreciably to right and left of center. Approximately half are of the nature of technical monographs issued primarily for the information and use of experts in the field. In these, we are inclined to tolerate some compromise with how things are said. I n other words, we are not particularly "fussy" about phraseology and the use of a "leading the reader by the hand" approach. However, these monographs do reach a number of people who are not experts and whose interests, therefore, cannot be entirely ignored. A combination approach which seems to work reasonably well in such cases is to make the first part of the report a kind of "once over lightly" treatment which answers in qualitative or semitechnical fashion, the "What?," "Why?," "How?," and "So What?" of the research being reported, and then to follow this with the detailed technical story.
The other half of the reports in this guided-missile series comprise monthly surveys of progress of the project. The Survey's primary clientele, we believe, consists of individuals whose duties are not such that they spend every day in a guided-missile laboratory but who, nevertheless, must maintain an up-to-date familiarity with the work. Many of these persons are at policy-making levels and have responsibilities of such multiplicity that the Survey may be the only publication dealing with this project which they have time to follow. Consequently, we feel that in the Survey readability is of immense importance and that the how-to-what ratio is unity or greater. We try, therefore, to make the Survey a semitechnical, continued story of the project's progress, written in plain, straightforward English. As a matter of fact we have invented a hypothetical Admiral for whom we say we write the Survey. Whenever an item proposed for this publication appears to one of us to be suspect from the standpoint of overtechnicality, idle words, gaps, and so forth, we say to ourselves, "Maybe the practicing technical expert can follow this, but houabout the Admiral?" This, of course, is no reflection on the intelligence of any admiral, hypothetical or real; it is simply a concrete, personalized recognition of the fact that in the survey we are writing principally for readers who are not supposed to be technically expert in all phases of guided-missile development but who do need to keep informed on progress, and that unless our report is readable and understandable our Admiral probably-and quite properly-will toss it overboard. In summary, then, it is suggested that any effective prescription for the preparation of understandable technical reports should include the following ingredients: 1. An initial period of "thinking the report through" during which the author asks himself questions of the kind listed previously and answers them carefully. 2. Exertion by the author of sufficient will power t o confine himself to straiehtforward, simnlv " constructed sentences phrased in plain English. 3. 'Adequate review by persons other than the author as insurance against discontinuities in the argument.
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