The ambiguity of words complicates writing.
Especially technical writing, with ambitious objectives: 1) to communicate definite, specific, ideas; 2) well-enough, to result in the formation of sufficiently equivalent ideas in the mind of a reader.
Communication must also account for existing ideas – ideas, already present in the mind of a reader; prior knowledge, which might obscure, pollute, or corrupt the composition or contextual framing, of new ideas
Often, the ambiguity of words follows from the ambiguity of minds.
consider general writing advice: 1) write to a specific audience; 2) for technical writing, as specific an audience as possible
To write, we translate knowledge to language.
Consider language a (lossy) knowledge serialisation protocol: to serialise knowledge (to language) a writer encodes concepts via a conceptual-linguistic encoding-space; to deserialise (interpret) language sufficiently-accurately, a reader must decode language back (to knowledge) via a ‘sufficiently-equivalent’ encoding-space.
For this reason, long established general writing advice suggests that writers first identify intended audience, as a basis/ proxy for selecting which encoding-space to target when writing, so that readers might (efficiently/ sufficiently) interpret language and understand corresponding concepts :
- Well-known terms/ concepts can be referenced directly
- New or less-certain terms/ concepts must be recomposed from well-known; and built-up in the mind of the reader
Scenarios :
personal note
- the writer targets their own encoding-space, which they also use when reading (to interpret language and understand corresponding concepts)
general writing
- the writer targets an encoding-space which corresponds to the (implicit) general domain; general readers interpret language and understand corresponding concepts
technical writing (same special-domain)
- the writer targets an encoding-space which corresponds to a special-domain; readers already familiar with the special-domain (implicit encoding-space) interpret language and understand corresponding concepts
technical accessible writing (relative general-domain)
- the writer targets an encoding-space which corresponds to an implicit relatively-general-domain; relatively-general readers interpret language and understand corresponding concepts
