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John Carroll did extensive research on an aspect of this in the 80s. His finding are recorded in a book called "The Nurnberg Funnel" and lead to the development of a practice called "minimalism" in...
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#4: Attribution notice removed
by
System
·
2020-01-03T20:41:49Z (almost 5 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/21115 License name: CC BY-SA 3.0 License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#3: Attribution notice added
by
System
·
2019-12-08T05:05:19Z (almost 5 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/21115 License name: CC BY-SA 3.0 License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision
by
System
·
2019-12-08T05:05:19Z (almost 5 years ago)
John Carroll did extensive research on an aspect of this in the 80s. His finding are recorded in a book called "The Nurnberg Funnel" and lead to the development of a practice called "minimalism" in technical communication. What Carroll observed was that people do not read manuals linearly. They prefer to engage with the product, work till they get stuck, and then use documentation to try to get unstuck. Carroll posited the existence of "the paradox of sensemaking" that says that what the reader already knows gets in the way of what they are reading and that it takes real world experience, and failure, to break down preconceptions and to actually makes sense of what the text is telling you. This is only one aspect of the broader question you are asking about -- and perhaps a higher level case, but I think the principles and the evidence to support them might be helpful.
#1: Imported from external source
by
System
·
2016-02-25T14:23:26Z (over 8 years ago)
Original score: 1