Correspondence.

"Cruel pies" and typos

"CRUEL PIES"

After reading the cover article of the August 2001 issue of Technical communication, "Cruel pies: The inhumanity of technical illustrations" I feel that I must respond strongly and immediately.

The authors of this article, Sam Dragga

In my mind, technical illustrations should relate only data and information, never emotion or the "human element." Technical illustrations, by definition, are for technical data in technical situations. If the authors want to encourage the use of graphics, bullets, highlights, and so forth in non-technical graphics, I applaud and agree with them. However, in this article no such distinction is made. The authors seem to indicate that the same information in the same format can be sold to all audiences, regardless of the make-up of the audience, and regardless of the purpose of the technical illustration.

First off, Mr. Dragga and Mr. Voss, you must take the audience for the information into consideration. Certain graphics work for certain audiences and not for others. Your Figure 11 shows a bar chart with a cartoon image of a baby about to fall down the stairs. These objects do not belong together. The bar charts could work better for a technical audience, such as a scientist at the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission. However, the picture might be offensive to a scientist from this agency. However, parents at home opening a new walker for their child might find the image far more informative than the bar charts.

In addition, the image you selected for this example highlights one of the gravest problems with using cute pictures-misinterpretation. Your image, showing a baby in a walker at the top of the stairs and an arrow pointing down the stairs, almost appears to suggest that the walker is intended to go down stairs. Sure, there is an ambulance (I think) at the bottom of the stairs, but it is not clear why the vehicle is there. Meanwhile, in the text of the article, you want to allow your audience to "infer" whether it is bad for a baby to go down the stairs in a walker. I'm confused.

In Figure 7, you want to add additional information to make sure the audience knows that war takes a heavy toll on human life, but you will let the audience decide on the benefits of taking a walker down the stairs. If I manufacture that walker, I am making darn sure that the audience knows this is a bad idea. I would not leave that to chance. Adding graphics to raw data can be helpful to the right people, harmful to the wrong people. Know your audience, gentlemen.

As to the addition of an image to the bar chart about high-risk professions, I found that the cutesy image belittles the importance of the information (not to mention the stereotyped nature of the picture: notice that your lumberjack is overweight, white, and male, and has a beard; where's the red and black checked jacket?). Again, know your audience. The cartoon image might work in a break room at a lumber yard, but will not fly in a scientific environment; the bar charts might grab the attention of folks at the EPA, but in the break room they will be lost. And again, the image is open to misinterpretation. Is he using the chain saw correctly? Is he an example of good practices or bad? Why is he there?

Instead of trying to integrate technical information with non-technical images, create different graphics for different audiences.

The solutions in your article also introduce editorializing of the illustrations. Your additions to the graphic in Figure 8 do not enhance the information but actually distort it by adding a bias. You added a quote from an industry official highlighting the dangers of fishing. By selecting that particular quote, you not only reported on the dangers, but also assigned blame. That graphic is not designed to assign blame. As a reader, I must now evaluate that person's politics, loyalty, competence, and qualifications before I can digest the full graphic. In addition, what if the quote were from a different industry official that suggested our fishers are safer now than ever? Or that most accidents are the fault of the fisher? That would clearly affect the information you are trying to relay.

In closing, it is not always well advised to add emotion or the "human element" to a graphic. In a "technical illustration" it is dangerous and distorting. It opens the information to scrutiny that should never be introduced. It introduces triviality, bias, and levity, while undermining trustworthiness, reliability, and authority. It is not my job as a technical communicator to tell my audience how it should feel about a given piece of information; it is my job to relay information accurately, completely, and without bias. When you are addressing a technical audience, it is always better to leave the editorializing, emotions, and semantics out of the picture. Literally. The audience can then make up its own mind.

However, if I am trying to relate a non-technical concept to a non-technical audience, a graphic might work. If I want to tell a parent that there is a danger of a child's falling out of the crib I manufacture, I might give them a graphic and leave the statistics for my product developers.

Know your audience, and deliver information designed specifically for that audience. Graphics, highlighting, call-outs, bullets, and other graphic tools can enhance certain information for certain audiences, while harming information for other audiences.

Michael Burke

THE AUTHORS RESPOND

Michael Burke's comments emphasize a critical point that we address in the final paragraphs of the article: the importance of the rhetorical situation. We said the following:

Not in every case would there necessarily be an appropriate graphic or text/graphic solution to an inhumane illustration. It is therefore also important to keep in mind that, though technical communicators are typically encouraged to incorporate visuals, using no graphics would be clearly superior to displaying cruel graphics.

and

Critics might also question how much humanizing of graphics is enough to be ethical. The answer is determined by rhetorical analysis of the audience, specifically its sensitivity to the humanistic implications of the graphic display. In a big city hospital with hurried doctors and harried nurses, for example, a photograph of the patient might be a crucial addition to his or her medical record; in a village clinic, however, such humanizing information might be gratuitous because the doctors and nurses know their patients personally.

We would never propose that the revised graphics we included as representative solutions were the only possible humanistic versions of such graphics. Obviously, different illustrations must be adapted to different purposes and different audiences. The key point of the article was that the inclusion of human images makes explicit the human dimension of the statistical information. We believe the inclusion of human images ought to be the convention in the field instead of the exception. Mr. Burke's objections to specific illustrations serve only to raise the next issue that technical communicators must consider: as the field adopts a humanistic visual ethics, it must also support research and develop guidelines regarding appropriate, effective, and unambiguous illustrations. For the record, we acknowledge Mr. Burke's observation that our clip art of the burly lumberjack treads perilously close to stereotype; indeed, had we tossed in the red-and-black checkered shirt, as he dryly allows, we'd have toppled over. On the other hand, we perceive the baby walker illustration as quite lucid: the vehicle that mystifies Mr. Burke is clearly labeled "ambulance" and the arrow plainly points from the baby to the ambulance instead of, as he claims, from the baby to the bottom of the stairs. To us, danger is the almost unavoidable conclusion the reader must reach....

The crucial point on which we differ with Mr. Burke's critique has to do with the moral responsibility of the profession. According to him, "It is not my job as a technical communicator to tell my audience how it should feel about a given piece of information; it is my job to relay information accurately, completely, and without bias." If, however, you leave invisible the human dimension of statistical information regarding human beings, we believe the resulting graphic is neither correct nor complete. It omits visual information that we consider critical (and that Mr. Burke, we must conclude, doesn't). We believe that to omit this human dimension is to introduce a distortion that privileges inanimate objects, stripping individuals of their humanity for the expedience of a readily available graphic display. We consider such a dehumanization of the people behind the statistics entirely unsatisfactory.

We would also challenge Mr. Burke's assumption that conventional illustrations are impartial. No illustration is devoid of bias. In the figure displaying fatalities in the fishing industry, for example, the decision to create a pie graph from the available statistics, to design the graphic with four slices (instead of five or six or seven), to color the slices of the pie--all are acts of interpretation. And all introduce bias: the conventional design of the graphic implies that information on human fatalities is like all other information regarding the fishing industry, no more important, no less. Such a graphic is, in fact, a biased interpretation of the statistics: by its sheer impersonality, it depreciates human life and makes the loss of life easier to tolerate. And such a graphic is no less built on emotions than the humanized examples in the article, but here the emotions are callousness and cruelty, severity and insensitivity. Such a graphic does tell audiences how to feel about the information it disp lays: it tells them to feel nothing, to feel indifferent.

Given a choice of humanized technical communication or heartless statistical depictions, we believe the ethical imperative is clear.

Sam Dragga

Dan Voss

THE SECRET LIFE OF TYPOS

I'm writing in response to the letter in the May 2000 issue from Joe Young regarding typos.

In your usual diplomatic way, you explained to Mr. Young that it was human error on the part of you and your staff that let the typo slip through.

You failed, however, to inform Mr. Young of the real reason for the typo, and, for that matter, the secret weapon wielded by all journal editors, myself included.

My father, a civil engineer, imparted to me a secret for having very complex plans of (for example) a city water-supply system approved by a bureaucratic inspector: Making certain that the plans were as perfect as possible, he deliberately erased and reinserted a word on the first sheet--misspelled! His theory (and experience) had proven that an inspector, having located that error and forcing its correction, would not find others.

When I became a journal editor (in the last century), the following editor's secret was imparted to me: Always have at least one typo in every issue to discover whether there really is anyone who reads your product. If you receive a squawk, your reply is that it was a deliberate error to determine the number of readers that found the material valuable enough to let you know.

As Mr. Young reads Tech comm, he is in a fraternally allied field, keeping our darkest secrets safe.

Dave Dobson

Fellow, Washington, DC chapter

Now that Mr. Dobson has let the secret out, I think that most readers can identify with both strategic uses of typos he describes. Most of us have had at least one reviewer who wasn't satisfied till he or she found an error to correct, and many have been tempted to plant an error to determine whether anyone was really reading document drafts. The problem is remembering--under the pressure of a deadline--to correct the error before publishing the document!

Editor

(tongue planted firmly in cheek)