Improving the readability of technical manuals

Since their development, manuals have been more of a hindrance than an aid to the people who use them. This problem exists because manuals are normally poorly organized and overly burdened with unnecessary theory. Furthermore, the cluttering of data makes the manual read like an encyclopedia rather than a quick-reference guide (as a manual should be).

The main effort to solve this problem has been the creation of tests that supposedly measure the readability level of the manual, that is, the level of knowledge and of interest required of the reader to comprehend the information in a given test. The impact of most of these tests on improving the readability level of manuals has been, for the most part, little if any. Most of the tests are inconsistent and consider only two aspects of the writing, sentence length and word length.

Such inefficient tests only contribute to the problem of poorly written manuals rather than curing it. The effects of poorly written manuals are many times serious. They can range from a computer user losing his/her file because the steps for saving the file were poorly documented to a person losing his/her life (or being seriously injured) because the operating procedures for a piece of equipment were incompletely or ambiguously outlined.

Recent research in the production of manuals has revealed that there are more desirable ways to solve the problem of poorly written manuals. New styles of writing, such as analytical writing, have been developed to cure the problem of the encylopedic manual. Furthermore, new formats such as mapping and instructional aids (for example. Job Performance Aids) have been developed to assist the author/editor in producing better manuals. Also researchers have shown that the cloze procedure (a sophisticated type of readability test) is very helpful in estimating the readability level of a text.

The benefits of these new developments can be numerous. They include more exact job descriptions, clearer and shorter instructions, and more use of visuals, all of which contribute to more readable manuals. Better manuals imply more efficient job performances, which can lead to savings in cost and time and improvements in employee morale.