I had a conversation this weekend with a friend who's involved in developing writing curricula for various different disciplines, and it got me to wondering about how I'd teach the particular style of writing needed in my own job.
There are really only two key elements:
- Control of tone: Emotional content is a very big part of everything we write, because much if not most of it is targeted at individuals, rather than a general audience.
- Clarity of content: The most minor of misunderstandings can spark week-long drama fests and infinitely repeated misinformation. (Ask me sometime about the function of hunger in UO.)
The content that requires factual clarity would probably be pretty much covered by a standard technical writing curriculum. I've learned it more or less by trial and error, but I think that's the easier part to teach. (Learning to translate patch notes from programmerese is a separate art...) The question of tone is the more interesting one.
We talk a lot about "good instincts" when discussing what to look for in a new hire, and while half of this is not necessarily writing-specific - when not to respond to a situation, when to ask for backup, that sort of thing - half of it is about choosing the most effective emotional content for a particular piece of writing and being able to accurately convey it. Both parts of that are very hard.
Picking the right emotional content is hard. It's slightly easier in one-on-one communications, because you only have to predict one person's reaction - but I very seldom get the luxury of dealing with my customers one-on-one. I usually need to talk to large numbers of them at once, and walk a very narrow path that will give me the best reaction from the largest number of people. Different communities have different temperaments - a friendly, cheerful tone may give you a warm and positive reaction from one group, whereas in another it's taken as a sign of weakness. Being able to read the room is one of those things that we call "instinct" and can only be taught by experience.
I would kill, however, for a class that taught how to convey that tone - avoiding common pitfalls, learning and working around loaded words and phrases ("working as designed," "soon," etc, in the MMO industry.) It is NOT a good area in which to have to learn by doing, but that's the only way I know how to teach it.
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2 comments:
I think you have it dead to rights. Especially in nonverbal online communications where context and tone can sometimes be lost. If you also consider that your audiance may not speak the language you are communicating in, it becomes a even more challenging.
Yeah, communicating with people for whom English is a second language, or writing for translators of potentially multiple languages, is a whole other layer of complication.
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