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In the literature of technical communication, minimalist principles have become the standard by which other strategies are judged. Unfortunately, there are two major problems to overcome if you want to write a minimalist document. First, you have to accept John Carroll's characterisation of users. Second, you have to interpret Carroll's vague guidelines.
User characterisation
Carroll appears to believe that all users are active experimenters, but many people have questioned this assertion, including Hester Glasbeek at Utrecht University. Glasbeek conducted an experiment with 10 people: 5 had one type of learning style and 5 had a different learning style. She constructed a minimal manual (with great effort) and found, as expected, that people with the first learning style only read the manual when they got stuck, and preferred the manual to conventional manuals. However, the people with the other learning style read the whole manual, in the order it was written: "Some of them even tried to carry out the instructions in the error recovery table, although they hadn't made any mistake [...] They had more, and more serious, problems than the explorative subjects. Most of these problems were caused by the lack of introductory material and by the incompleteness of some of the instructions". Current opinion seems to be that minimalist principles are a good basis for a documentation scheme, but need to be modified because users have different psychological needs.
Guidelines
The minimalist guidelines can be summarised as:
- Describe user tasks rather than system facilities
- Avoid duplication without using excessive referencing
- Don't elaborate
- Give hints rather than exhaustive details
- Assume readers will do things wrongly and supply recovery information
- Provide several ways of accessing the information
- Reduce the word and page count
Glasbeek had trouble interpreting the minimalist guidelines, as do many others. For example: how do you reduce the word count? Do you just leave out the adjectives or verbs? Carroll doesn't say. Would reducing the word count of an already minimalist document improve it further? Who knows? In fact, reduce the word count is simply a restatement of the familiar literary advice, be brief. In other words, if the manual under review is well-written by normal standards of good writing practice, the minimalist principle is redundant. The real contribution of minimalism is its advocacy of recovery information: assume readers will do things wrongly...
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