Bitesize Simplified Technical English – Reasons for using ASD-STE100 part 2
In last month’s STE Bite-size article Mekon’s Simplified Technical English trainer Ciaran Dodd  said that a good reason for using STE is that its philosophy and rules describe good writing practice. Therefore, anyone producing technical content can benefit from using STE. This month Ciaron focuses on customers who have moved to structured authoring and show how STE gives additional structure to content.

Simplified Technical English (STE) adds structure to your content

When I first started delivering training in ASD Simplified Technical English ASD-STE100 (STE) in 2002, it was known as AECMA Simplified English. My main customers were in the aerospace and defence industries where companies were required to use Simplified English for regulatory (for example ATA 100 now ATA iSpec 2200: Information Standards for Aviation Maintenance) or contractual reasons. AECMA developed Simplified English as early as 1986 because the aerospace industry recognised how important it was “to keep documents as simple and as readable as possible.” (1-6-1, ASD-STE100, Issue 6).

Since 2002, the way that companies produce technical documents and use technical content has changed beyond all recognition with the advance of technology. One of the main developments is the use of XML to separate content from form and to facilitate better structure and reuse of content. One standard that is used for creating structured documents is ASD S1000D, developed originally for the aerospace and defence industries. S1000D requires the use of STE.  For me this is evidence that structured authoring and STE complement each other.

Content is built with modules that are carefully structured. But what about the structure of the content within each module? The content within the modules also needs to be structured and controlled. One of the main reasons for this is the benefits for translation (more next month) but STE puts discipline and standardisation into documents that improves the quality of the content. For example:

  1. STE permits six verb forms. (The -ing form of the verb is not one of the permitted verb forms!)  Verbs (actions) are the heart of an English sentence and we have many verb forms that allow us to express precisely when things happen and for how long. Many verb forms are complex to write correctly and to understand, so STE takes away this complexity and gives you what you need to write technical content precisely. The challenge for the writer is to structure content carefully to comply with these rules.
  1. For procedural writing there is only one permitted form – the imperative or command form. In STE, you begin each instruction with a verb written in the command form, much like in a recipe: mix, add, pour. This gives procedures clarity and consistency, particularly when the meanings of the verbs are defined in the STE dictionary.
  1. Descriptive writing is much harder to write than procedural writing because you are usually explaining how equipment looks and how it works. Here STE gives some of the best guidance I have seen on structuring paragraphs and sentences to help the reader. STE describes how using key words in each sentence or paragraph can show your reader the logic of what you are explaining. There is even a worked example to show you.

These rules, along with the principles that I mentioned in last month’s post, are key to structuring your paragraphs and sentences tightly. This improves the quality of what goes into the structured modules and ultimately helps the reader to find the information that they need quickly and make sense of it easily. If your readers can do that every time they read your content, then you are succeeding. That for me is another good reason to use STE.

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Find out more about our Simplified Technical English Specification: ASD-STE100 training

Next month: Reasons for using ASD-STE100 3 – the benefits for translation