An Invitation of VIP

Dear Customer,

Thanks for your reliance and your purchase of our product. That is our honor! In order to let you have a better purchase experience, we sincerely to invite you to become our VIP! And you can get these Welfare if you become our VIP:

1. You can get satisfied and perfect after-sales service;

2. You can always get Free products;

3. You can know more promotions, save more money!

Just contact with our service team….

Best wishes to you!

Genuine Seller

That? Oh, it came on a little card with the new recording device. From China. You can imagine what the instructions are like. I wish I could read Chinese, I really do. That side of the manual probably makes more sense. Particularly when you consider that the diagram is labelled in reverse – as I found when I hit 'noise reduction' instead of 'record'. By the way, 'noise reduction' isn't a good idea when recording a piano….for a minute I thought I'd forgotten to use the damper pedal….

These are the days of miracles and international wonders, people, and I'm not talking about our political leaders. Amazing products pop up on the market for us to try. If we put our minds to it, we can do creative things even our parents' generation never dreamed of. See this week's video offering. I can download footage taken by an astronaut in orbit and put it in a file at home. Using my handy-dandy Chinese digital recorder, which fits in the palm of my hand, I can make a stereo recording of myself playing a 100-year-old pipe organ. (It was hot weather, and the organ hates hot weather, so be kind.) Then, using the program I got for free with my purchase of this now-elderly computer, I can put it all together, and upload it to Youtube, a free service. Uploading takes perhaps five of our Earth minutes. And voilà! We have what used to take a filmmaker days or weeks or….

We can do this because we have technology. That's a ten-dollar word for 'tool'. Humans have been making tools since ancient times. For humans, making a tool is not quite the trick we like to make it out to be. We see a need. We fiddle. We get frustrated. We finally break down and think. The unfamiliar sensation startles us. Then we give up, at which point an Idea forces its way to the surface of what we call our brains, and we make the new tool. Then we run around bragging about it, and asking people for something in return: recognition in the form of a medal or new feathered headdress, power, sexual favours, snack food….you get the idea.

What we do not do very often is try to explain to other people how the tool works. We leave that for them to figure out. In this age of the Gizmo of the Week, this lack of explanation is beginning to reach crisis proportions.

Thank the gods for Google.

Yesterday, I found out that my relatives couldn't see the 'private' video I'd put on Youtube. Obviously, I hadn't understood the directions, such as they were. Youtube has lots of info for people who post videos, just not that info. Hm. I must be thick. I googled the problem, and had an answer on a pull-down menu within seconds. Problem solved.

The directions for the Chinese recording device aren't on Google. Instead, it keeps trying to show me the leading brand. Phooey. It's back to trial and error, but as you'll notice from this week's video, I'm managing. I don't really want to use it for corporate espionage, anyway, so I don't need to make notes on the thing or render the files password-protected. I just want to record some music without the organ bass destroying the recording device.

When I was at university, I was fortunate enough to know a clever and witty woman who taught technical writing. Lois wrote directions for many people, including the US military. She decided the Air Force were the dumbest. Her reasoning?

When you write for the Army, you say, 'Install the unit, using a screwdriver.' When you write for the Air Force, you say, 'Take the screwdriver in your right hand. Insert the head into the slot in the screw. Turn five times clockwise….'

Instructions are important. They require a methodical mind. Writing them compels you to break down processes into steps in proper sequence. Writing instructions makes you think about how others think: what they know, what they don't know, what they need to know. It's an exercise in logic and empathy at the same time. Writing instructions is good for your brain, and makes you a better writer.

The world may not recognise instruction-writing as an achievement. There are no medals for Valour in Instructional Writing. You won't get rich or famous doing it. Nobody will offer you sexual favours or even snacks in return, unless you're very, very lucky. Heck, I got snacks for breaking green beans over at Hoggetts' Farm (and half a dozen cans of beans), which is more appreciation than I usually get for writing instructions. Okay, they pay you for writing them, but it's not showbiz. On the other hand, without instructions, we're stuck in a world of trial-and-error experimentation. This is costly, wasteful, and causes a lot of extraneous bad language.

Do us a favour: figure out something you know how to do, but a lot of other people don't. Write instructions for it. Send it to Peer Review. The snacks will be virtual, but you'll get a lot of smileys for your trouble. Make the world a safer place with less cussing.

Writing Right with Dmitri Archive

Dmitri Gheorgheni

27.08.18 Front Page

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