R. John Brockmann

The why, where and how of minimalism

Minimalism is the self-described label that a group of current researchers and writers have given to computer documentation’s newest style of writing. It’s chief theorist is John Carroll of the IBM Watson Research Laboratories who has published articles about his minimalist experiments over the last six years and has recently packaged them all in a new book by MIT Press, The Nurnberg Funnel, published earlier this summer.

Does Clio Have a Place in Technical Writing? Considering Patents in a History of Technical Communication

Technical writers need a historical perspective in order to distinguish between enduring and transitory writing standards, to understand the variety of past styles in building future styles, and to give the profession a better sense of self-identity. To overcome the problems in developing a historical perspective, such as a dearth of artifacts to examine and the peculiarities in rhetorical time and place which undercut attempts to generalize on historical information, the 200 year-old federal collection of patents is offered as a solution. This collection of patents is also very often the only remaining written work of the ordinary mechanic of the nineteenth century, and this collection truly reflects technical not legal, business, or science writing.

William Stillman, Rhode Island Mechanician and Communicator--His Lock Patents and Acrostics.

Focusing only on the famous and celebrated has skewed military and political history; focusing only on Oliver Evans, Lauchlan McKay, John W. Griffiths, Joseph Crane, and John H. Patterson could similarly skew our sense of American technical communication in the nineteenth century. Exploring the written work of an ordinary American mechanician of the nineteenth century, William Stillman of Rhode Island, could help balance our appraisal of nineteenth-century American technical communication. Reviewing the writing and graphics in his 1851 Miscellaneous Compositions, as well as his 1839 lock patent and 1836 bank lock instructions, reveals Stillmans ambidextrous abilities in using both text and graphics to communicate; abilities similar to his more famous fellow citizens. However, the three-dimensional qualities of his 1839 patent graphic reveals an unusual ability to mimic the biological methods in which the human eye sees three dimensions.

Victor W. Pagé's Early Twentieth-Century Automotive and Aviation Books: “Practical Books for Practical Men”

Victor W. Pagé was either the first or one of the first to make a living primarily as a technical communicator in the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s. His 33 automotive and aviation books published by the Norman W. Henley Company were popular with both the public and critics because they contained timely, comprehensive coverage of novel technology; profuse illustrations; occasional analogies; easy-to-access information; well-established expertise; and sophisticated employment of task orientation. Pagé was able to publish many books quickly because he reused manufacturers and his own material and methods of organization. He was also able to communicate his novel information effectively because he had both extensive firsthand experience with early automobiles and planes and because he was continually involved in teaching. Victor Pagés early twentieth-century work demonstrates both what have become mainstream techniques in technical communication and a number of unique rhetorical strategies.

A Homunculus in the Computer

The 1995 appearance of Microsofts Bob interface directly poses the question of how anthropomorphic the human computer interface design should be. A historical approach to the question offers three important observations to designers: 1) that the impulse to anthropomorphicize technology has been longstanding and has been employed with artifacts other than computers; 2) that the normal evolution of technologies proceeds through an introductory phase during which a culture becomes acclimatized to the new technology; moreover, one of the methods by which cultures have traditionally become acclimatized to new technologies is through anthropomorphization; and 3) the perception of anthropomorphism in the human computer interface has been complicated by the fact that “computers” were, in fact, first people not machines. An historical approach to answering the interface design question posed by Microsofts Bob interface suggests that designers productively accommodate the longstanding human impulse to anthropomorphicize new technologies.

Not post-usability, just different usability

the very limited intelligence of, say, a Cue Card, this form of help would identify and address subtle user errors and many forms of user uncertainty. Here we approach the dream of documentation that functions as a cooperative, expert assistant who is always available to the user. In this scenario, standard help, balloon-type annotations, wizards, and other forms of documentation might indeed be supplanted by this one monolithic but extremely powerful and effective form of help. Here the role of documentors would not be to write Commentary 29 documentation but rather to work with programmers to plan out how this expert assistant will interact with users under varying circumstances. Short of this technology, software products will continue to offer various forms of distinctive help, each with a certain primary strength: for standard help it is the completeness of its user support; for balloon-type annotations, it is the rapid access to information and support for problem-solving; for step-by-step prompts, it is the protection and guidance of the user. Each still requires all the authoring skill that we can apply. To ensure that their critical messages are heard by an audience that is often is predis-posed to disagree, prophets have shouted, performed absurd acts, and invented shocking words and phrases. Edmond Weiss wants to join such a prophetic rhetorical tradition in our field of computer documentation and, specifically, in the area of usability. He shouts in his article using pejorative words such as • stubborn, • paternalistic, and • menu-trees (a no-no weve all learned to abhor over the last decade [1]) to label his opponents, 80s style usability adherents. His shocking words and phrases draw dramatic, if somewhat fallacious, either or distinctions such as: Beneath all this prophetic bluff and bluster, however, Professor Weiss is accurate in describing how the environment of usability and the genre of user manuals have transformed in the last decade • from a time of technology introduction to a time of technology acclimatization; • from a time of technology one-person-does-it-all (owner-operator-mechanic) to a time of technology nested within a growing support infrastructure (owners, operators, and mechanics distributed to different roles and specialists); and • from a time of author-reader ultimatum to a time of author-reader negotiation. Thus Weiss calls for a new sense of usabil-ity, authorship, and text. Not only is his call

A homunculus in the computer

This paper focuses upon is the use of personification and anthropomorphicism in the development of new technologies. When UNIVAC 1 predicted a landslide for Eisenhower over Stevenson based on an analysis of early election returns, a finding that flew in the face of all the human political pundits, Charles Collingwood refused to believe the findings and told Cronkite on the air: [UNIVAC] sent me back a very caustic ansvver. He said that if we continue to be so late in sending him results, its going to take him a few minutes to find out just what the prediction is going to be. So hes not ready yet with the predictions, but were going to go to him in jusl a little while (Shurkin, 252). This was the choice of language used for the frost commercial electronic digital computer. And many years later, when Clarke portrayed HAL the computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey, he chose a quite similar way to address the computer: Bowman, the Captain, started the conversation: Have you any idea, he said, whats causing the fault? It was unusual for HAL to pause so long. Then he answered: Not really, Dave. As I reported earlier, 1 cant localize the trouble. This human impulse to anthropomorphicize novel technology is nothing new, some of the earliest sewing machines were, for inst ante, designed in the forms of cherubs and squirrels, and the earliest steam engines had claws and h~d their output measured in horsepower. The problem of this personification or anthropomorphicisrn comes to us in urgent form now at the very frontier of technical communication—the developing guidelines for the human-computer interface. From the technical communication point of view, how should the human-computer interface be designed? How human-like should it be? Using a historical understanding of the human impulse to anthropomorphicize novel technology, we can begin to abstract and select those qualities of human-to-human conversation for the human-to-computer conversation. We also need to be sure that the kind of agent we will put in the computer will be more honest about its silicon origins. Thus we will probably see fewer I S or other anthropomorphic adjectives in messages generated by the computer. And the interface will reveal the fact that all those wizard-like human responses me really nothing mcme than the technical communicator or programmer who designed the program or the interface. This more machine-ness of …

Part three: new books on writing computer user documentation

When I began teaching computer user documentation, there were very few books on the subject...and the few that existed werent very good (John ORourkes <u>Writing for the Reader</u> (1976) excepted). Much has changed since--most notably the increasing interest and market for books on computer user documentation. In fact, so many books have been published in the last three years that this is the third in a series of reviews of ten such books.