Back to Basics: Skills that Never Lose Value

By Michael Harvey | Associate Fellow

Are there skills that technical communicators can cultivate for lasting value? Sure there are. You first developed them as a child, and you have used them throughout your life. Sharpening them requires practice, but luckily it also entails fun.

Technical communicators must keep their technical skills current. We must keep up with changes in technical domains to maintain market relevance. But technical skills can become a commodity, and technical domains can become obsolete. XML has been around for a while and XML programming will continue to be a valuable skill. DITA, by virtue of it being open source, will probably persist, too. But XML, like any markup language, can be learned relatively quickly. How do you distinguish your skills from all the other XML specialists? How many DITA experts can the market sustain?

So what skills never lose value? The three Rs: Reading, wRiting, and aRithmetic.

Reading Skills

Reading skills help you process what you read efficiently and get the most benefit from what you read. In an economy driven by the flow of information, being able to effectively process that flow gives you a competitive edge.

The Mind Tools website (www.mindtools.com/rdstratg.html) offers reading strategies to maximize your reading time:

Know what you want to know. Ask yourself why you are reading a particular text and then examine the text to see whether it is helping you meet that goal.
Know how deeply to study the material. If shallow knowledge of a topic is required, simply skim headings, introductions, and summaries. If moderate knowledge is needed, scan the text. If detailed knowledge is desired, review headings, skim the text to get a sense of its structure, and then study sections of text in depth.
Engage in active reading. Highlight and annotate text as you cover it.
Learn how to study different sorts of material. Newspapers are laid out differently from magazines, which are laid out differently from journal articles, and so on. Understanding why different kinds of material have different layouts aids your extraction of information.
Create your own table of contents. Figure out what you think a text should cover before you read it. Write down your outline. Refer to your outline as you read; you might find omissions or irrelevancies in the text.
Use indexes, tables of content, and glossaries. These are valuable tools to navigate documents.

Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren's How to Read a Book (1972) is a primer for developing different levels of reading—for example, how to skim, speed read, and deeply read. It contrasts techniques to read different kinds of text, such as practical books or novels. Fundamentally, you must come to terms with an author's vocabulary and message, and truly understand what the author is trying to communicate. Only after you understand the author's message can you legitimately agree or take issue with it.

The Mind Tools website and Adler and Van Doren's book make the same basic point: comprehending what you read requires disciplined application of a few basic principles. To master these principles requires diligent practice. Practicing your reading skills leads to improved writing skills.

Writing Skills

Writing skills comprise defining your audience, determining what they need, and putting paragraphs together to fulfill that need. The ability to communicate clearly, correctly, conversationally, and concisely will never lose market value. This ability is especially critical to someone who communicates about complex technology. A sophisticated consumer of technology collects well-written technical manuals because it helps her master the subject matter and tools of her profession.

This is true where I work. I write about complex tools to help financial analysts, actuarial scientists, and statisticians manage financial risk. These folks analyze massive quantities of financial data, attempt to fit probability distributions to them, build models to show what will happen to specific risk factors that affect the value of their portfolios, and derive plans for safeguarding their holdings. There are no casual users of the business analytics software that I document. Business analytics requires doing your homework and studying the documentation.

It is my job to provide context for these tools, explain the underlying statistics (without recreating existing statistics textbooks), and describe how to do the complex things they need to do. The value I add is crisply and correctly guiding these financial experts through the system. Thus, I have to keep my writing skills sharp. I need to be able to render something like this:

In the … procedure, dynamic covariance simulation requires you to use a transformation method program to specify a state-switching function that induces a switching of states during market state generation.

Into something like this:

Dynamic covariance simulation enables you to simulate risk factors using a set of covariance matrices, controlling which covariance matrix to use to generate a market state according to a set of rules that you set up.

Take a moment to consider the changes I made. I chose to separate the topic of “transformation method program,” which I can describe in detail elsewhere in the manual, from the topic of “dynamic covariance simulation.” I chose to emphasize what you're able to do and how. I did away with the notion of a “state-switching function,” because the definition provided seemed circular, and instead talked about the end result—controlling which matrix to use for a specific market state. Later, I can provide a specific example that illustrates the point.

Business analytics isn't the only area where good writing skills are at a premium. Local and state governments realize that an investment in clear writing pays off. “Clear communication is an essential government function in a democratic society,” says Bob Kerrey, a former governor and senator from Nebraska. “Because writing is how agencies communicate with each other and their constituents, all of us have a stake in the clarity and accuracy of government writing” (see http://sparkaction.org/node/30870). Business-requirements documents that are clear and to the point are likely to save projects time and money.

The habits you need to develop to master writing skills are straightforward:

Write every day. Whether it is an email message, a plan, a report, a chapter, or an exegesis, commit words to paper (or a file) every day. Strive to make every sentence clear. Make sentences in a paragraph hang together, and make paragraphs lead to a clear point. When I start a paragraph with a clear topic sentence, supporting sentences are much easier to compose. When I do not have a clear idea of what I am trying to say, clear sentences elude me.
Read what you write. After you commit words to paper, read them carefully. Read aloud what you have written, because it can help you more quickly discover passages that need revision. It also leads to writing more conversational prose. Nothing helps me find an awkward sentence more quickly than reading it aloud. Use your sharpened reading skills to find omissions and irrelevances in your prose.
Revise what you write. After you read what you write, review it and rewrite to omit needless words. Passages ripe for pruning often appear in a first draft. In a recent article for my community newsletter, I wrote about how the role of technical writing was changing. I had written a long paragraph about employment statistics that I thought underscored my primary point. The more I reviewed the article, the more I realized that the paragraph was tangential to, rather than supporting, the point. Even though it was hard for me to trash something that I had spent an hour developing, I did. It brought the main point into sharper focus.
Ask for feedback. Ask others to review your writing and explain what they understood and what they found confusing. You have to have a thick skin to be a writer. Over the years, I have detached “me” from my writing, so that when someone takes issue with or criticizes my writing, I do not take it personally. Conversely, I try not to let it go to my head when someone praises my work.
Read what others write. Find authors whose style you admire and read as much of their material as you can. Use your reading skills to analyze the style to determine what elements you can use in your own writing. Does the writer vary sentence length? Does she use strong hooks to get you interested in what she has to say? Does she use a varied and colorful vocabulary? After you have identified what it is you like about the writing, try to emulate it in your own.

Arithmetic Skills

Writing communicates ideas and actions with words. Arithmetic communicates ideas about reality with signs, numbers, and symbols. Broadly speaking, becoming skilled with arithmetic means acquiring a basic knowledge of and developing comfort with mathematics. According to Wikipedia, mathematics is “the study of quanity, structure, space, and change.” That pretty much touches every technical domain that exists. You do not have to be able to recite pi to fourteen digits to demonstrate fluency with mathematics. Understanding the progression from arithmetic to algebra to trigonometry to calculus does not require a natural knack for numbers.

To sharpen your mathematical skills, develop the following habits:

Count. When you balance your checkbook or measure ingredients for a recipe, you count. Opportunities to count abound. How long do you take in the shower? How many pieces of fruit do you eat each day? How many pictures do you have on your wall?
Observe and recognize patterns. Did you spend as much on groceries last month as you did the month before? Or less? Do you think you'll spend as much this month? If you get paid at the end of the month, will you need to dip into savings before then to keep on top of your bills?
Understand principles. You cannot simply memorize mathematical formulas, you need to understand why they work as they do.
Remember that mathematics is cumulative. What you learn in algebra will help you tackle trigonometry, what you learn in trig will help you tackle calculus, and so on.
Read texts. With sharpened reading skills, you can develop the aptitude to read Calculus for Dummies and the confidence to tackle original texts about calculus by Leibnitz or Newton.

The analytical abilities that you develop from sharpening your math skills can be applied directly to your job as a technical communicator. As Vanderbilt University explains to its undergraduates, “by studying math you develop analytical skills and an analytical attitude. You learn to pay attention to all the assumptions involved in a given problem or situation, and you learn to break down a complicated problem into a series of tractable steps. You develop the habit of critical thinking: testing your conclusions—and the conclusions of others—to make sure they're based on adequate data and accurate reasoning. Such skills and attitudes are highly valued by employers” (see www.math.vanderbilt.edu/~undergrad/misc/prospmajors.html). Doesn't this sound like what we technical communicators already do whenever we approach a new subject? Doesn't it make sense to try to get better at this?

As you sharpen your reading, writing, and arithmetic skills, enjoy yourself! Don't approach these principles and habits as chores to be completed. Consider them avocations to be pursued, which just happen to increase your value as a technical communicator.

Thoughtful reading is the foundation of analysis, which is a prized skill in any industry. Quality writing never loses market value. Albert Einstein said, “Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.” Having an appreciation of that poetry allows you to attack any new intellectual domain with precision and dispatch. Reading, writing, and arithmetic skills never lose market value because they form the core of any other intellectual skill, and they lay the foundation for technical knowledge of any other domain. They can be practiced throughout a career and enjoyed over a lifetime.

MICHAEL HARVEY (mtharvey@yahoo.com) works at SAS Institute Inc. as a statistical writer. He is a member of the STC Carolina Chapter, where he has served in various leadership positions. His professional profile is available at www.linkedin.com/in/mtharvey.

Reading Skills

Writing Skills

Arithmetic Skills

Suggested Reading