Campbell, Chapter 5: Is There a Certain Format I Should Use?

There is no answer for the best format for policies and procedures. It depends on a number of things.

Beginning to Determine Format
The format depends on your audience, material, and management. However, if you are writing policies and procedures for an outside licensing, accreditation, or regulatory body, you may not have a format choice.

Format and Audience: Figure out who your audience is because certain formats work better for certain audiences (i.e. flowcharts for engineers).

Format and Material: Your information should narrow your format options (i.e. safety procedures require absolute clarity, therefore, your format should be clear, distinct, and make the material easily understandable). The Format Options Chart (5-1) gives general guidelines for which formats to use with which types of material).

Format and Management: If you want a format that management is not comfortable with, make sure to explain it and present your reasons for choosing it.

Deciding on Page Layout
The page layout gives readers basic information about the policy or procedure, such as title, number, or effective date; it also identifies information that is critical to proper use. The amount and types of information you standardize in your page layout is up to you. The goal is to keep it simple so the standardized information that doesn’t detract attention from the policy or procedure itself. Readers should be able to scan the page layout quickly, and then focus immediately on the body of the text.

Choosing Among Format Options
Once you decided on page layout, you need to choose a format for the main text. You have several options: narrative, outline, playscript, or flowchart. You also have secondary format options: question and answer, troubleshooting, matrix table, and list. Once you choose a primary format, you need to use it throughout your document.

Using Primary Formats
The following are brief descriptions of primary formats, which are the mainstay of the document.

Narrative: standard sentence-and-paragraph style. Usually single column of unbroken print running from left to right on page. Two-column formats are also common. Used more often for policies than procedures. Not effective with complex, difficult, or lengthy material.

Outline: variation of standard narrative. Text is separated into distinctly shorter sections and subsections, all labeled. Section identified with numbers, letters, or an alphanumeric combination. Can be used widely. Used in both policies and procedures. Logical and easy to follow.

Playscript: Excellent for procedures that involve more than one person or department. In its simplest form, playscript has two columns. The first column tells who’s responsible, and the second describes what’s required. The steps in the second column are in sequence. This form can be adapted. Playscripting’s visual clarity makes it remarkably fast and easy to find information. Highly recommended for any procedure with more than on actor or responsible party. Not appropriate for policies.

Flowchart: a diagram of a process, which uses symbols and arrows to indicate flow and action. Commonly used in procedures than in policies, but can be used in either. Danger of flowcharts is that they can become cluttered and hard to read.

Using the Secondary Formats
Secondary formats are those that are used as inserts inside the primary format. They can stand on their own as primary formats in some highly specialized documents. There are four secondary formats: question and answer, troubleshooting (or help), matrix table, and lists. These formats summarize, clarify, or expand, on the information in the body of the text.

Question and Answer: used in both policies and procedures. Address items that are particular concern to readers. Sections simulate a personal conversation-worded informally. Good places to address the concerns you know readers have about the policies and procedures.

Troubleshooting: also called help sections and sometimes reference sections. Used primarily in procedures. Deal with breakdowns or exceptions. Often presented in chart format, where each problem is listed individually along with solution.

Matrix Table: connect one variable to a second variable. Excellent format to use when readers need to refer repeatedly to the information periodically over time. Eliminates the need for constant rereading and searching. Have wide application.

List: lists break the denseness of the printed page and let the eye skim quickly. Reader gets impression of information relatively easy to grasp and use. Main purpose is to shorten, organize, and clarity.

Combing Formats
All different formats are often combined and these combinations can be very effective. However, do not randomly or excessively change formats, because this can create a consistency problem.

Experiments and Hybrids
None of these formats is sacrosanct. Experiment with them, modify them, and adapt them to your needs. You can combine virtually any format option with any other option.

Thanks for reading our chapter summary! Gary and Jennifer

What's Technical about Technical Writing

Chapter 8: What’s Technical About Technical Writing?
by David N. Dobrin

Team 2: Gary Teagarden and Jennifer Bruns



David Dobrin, the author of this article not happy with an over-simplified definition of technical writing—“Technical writing is writing about technology.” In the introduction of this essay Dobrin notes that he wanted something more about what technical writers do. “And what they do is write or ghostwrite manuals and reports.”

Observes Dobrin: “The reports and manuals appear when there is a technology, a writer, and readers who want to use the technology. When the pieces succeed, they act as a kind of semipermeable membrane that lets understanding leak through at a controlled rate.”

Dobrin trys to come to a more refined, all encompassing definition of technical writing. He looked at pioneering work of several academics in trying to construct a definition: Fred MacIntosh, John Walter, Patrick Kelley and Roger Masse. For example, Kelley and Masse state, “Technical writing is writing about a subject in the pure sciences in which the writer informs the reader through an objective presentation of the facts.”

Writing Technically

“The definers of ‘technical writing’ look at texts; the definers of ‘writing technically’ look at the encounter which produces the texts.” John Harris defines technical writing: “Technical writing is the rhetoric of the scientific method.” In quoting another expert in Earl Britton, Dobrin writes that not only must writing be objective, it must be univocal. That is, “The primary, though certainly not the sole, characteristic of technical and scientific writing lies in the effort of the author to convey one meaning and only one meaning in what he says.

Britton explains that writing is like music. If one wants complexity in music, one writes a symphony. If one wants to wake up soldiers, one plays reveille on a bugle. Literature is the symphony; technical writing is the bugle call.

Dobrin: “The technical writer speaks with the care of a scientist, the humility of a saint, and the clarity of the bugle call.” Talk about an apt metaphor.

Sections within this piece speak of univocality—precise language and only one meaning to the copy in question. More theory is discussed when he discusses the universalist view of language and the monadist view. The nuances of these definitions are confusing and must be read carefully to grasp the differences. Those taking the universalist view believe a sentence can mean a particular thing and that precisely that meaning can be understood. The monadist alternative is to see language as it is actually used, rather than as a formal system.

A New Definition of Technical Writing

After a thorough discussion, Dobrin notes “Technical writing is writing that accommodates technology to the user.” People do not read technical writing for fun, but because they need to do a task. Technical writing gives what is useful, not what is unknown.

He finishes his piece with a take on how people end up in technical writing—typically from two paths: Technicians who learn how to write and writers who learn to excel at technology. Which are you?