The Immutable Laws of Technical Writing

The client never gives a brief

In technical writing the word brief is not used so much as a noun (meaning something that is written in order to inform or edify) but rather in its adjectival sense of short, skimpy and inadequate. Therefore, long before he is clear about what he wants, the client will ring you up to give you an imprecise notion of the project. You may then be asked to one or more meetings at which the client will try to decide, often with colleagues, what he wants. You will then be expected to write the specification, based on a vague understanding of his ramblings. If you get it wrong, it's your fault.

The client might then, very grudgingly and in no particular order, give you scraps of so-called briefing-material, some of them irrelevant, but all of which you must read. His attitude to providing you with such information will resemble that of someone giving out secret formulae to competitors. On no account will the client think through what he wants, write down the objectives of the project, or give you all the raw-material you need at the start of the job. (There is a sub-law to the effect that the importance of the briefing-material varies in inverse proportion to how soon you get it during the life of the project.) Presumably, when the client goes to his tailor, he simply stands in the middle of the shop and waits while the assistant guesses what he wants to buy. Therefore ...

The significance of trivial and perhaps even justifiable mistakes in the writer's first draft greatly outweighs the gross omissions and inaccuracies in the client's patchy and incomplete brief

The client can never get hold of the machine-readable version of something he sent you on paper

Such documents delete themselves from clients' computers, and anyway, what do you want it on disk for? Can't you type? Exceptions to this rule are very short documents which take longer to be converted from the client's word-processing software than for you to key them in.

The work is always very urgent for you but never for the client

The fact that you were briefed close to the deadline is your fault, not the client's. Although you are told that the project is of immense corporate importance, the client will give it scant attention and only then at the last minute. The fact that the project runs late is, however, your fault because you started on it late.

It takes the client much longer to read something than it takes you to write it

After giving you a deadline, the client will nag you to complete the work before that deadline. However, the moment you deliver the work, the client will mysteriously disappear from the scene. Estimates of the ratio between writing-time and reading-time vary, but a document that takes three hours to write can easily take a week to read. Writers who deliver drafts close to, or just after, the deadline are scoundrels. By contrast, clients who delay projects by taking a long time to read drafts are either loveable rogues or extremely busy and important people.

Clienthood carries with it a PhD in linguistics and an Oxford chair in literature

Although the client may not even have O level English, since he is the client, his knowledge of the language is innately better than that of someone with a degree in the subject who has been writing for a living for 15 years. This applies particularly to the most arcane aspects of syntax and style. Presumably, if the client requires a triple heart-bypass, he advises the surgeon on how to do the operation.

The point of a client's reading a draft is to check that you have implemented all his corrections in precisely the way he specified them

The client will not read the whole document to see how it hangs together or how it might come across to the lay reader, but just looks at the bits he changed last time.

The client's propensity to lose important documents is an endearing character-trait

However, your inability to lay your hands immediately on something whose title and content the client can only vaguely recollect, and which, upon examination, he never, in fact, gave you in the first place, is gross incompetence.

The client never gives you all his reactions to any draft

Being either tremendously busy or a loveable rogue, and given that it takes so much longer to read something than to write it, the client can only reasonably be expected to glance at your drafts. This applies particularly in the early stages of the project, when major mistakes might otherwise be spotted before they are multiplied throughout the work.

The corresponding sub-laws are that the extent of the revisions required by the client varies in direct proportion to how far advanced the project is, and that the first few pages of a document always require much more revision than later ones. Furthermore, the more detailed and/or strategically crucial the client's amendments are, the more likely they are to be given to you, not on paper, but from a public telephone at an airport.

The client will criticise form, not substance, in the early stages of the project, and substance rather than form in the later stages

When reading early drafts, he will concentrate on layout and typography (which don't matter at that stage). Only once the material has been typeset and a motorcycle-messenger is waiting in reception to take the artwork to the printer will the client look closely at the factual content, and then he will triumphantly spot something which is, of course, your fault.

The client has no corporate style or graphic standards, or if he does, he cannot lay his hands on them just now

But God help you if the work doesn't conform to those standards.

The client does not exist

The person you have to deal with may change the brief (presuming there is one) and require numerous rewrites, and, although you have to do as this person tells you, he does not have the final signoff on the work. Other people, whom you may never meet, may also change the nature of the project as it proceeds, though they are not responsible for it either.

The person who can actually judge if the work is acceptable always sees it late on in the project (if at all) and, to your primary contact's surprise, asks for changes of quite a different kind from those you have already been required to make. Sometimes these changes involve putting things back the way they were. However, the fact that you did not anticipate the requirements of the person with ultimate signoff is not the fault of the people who made all those spurious amendments, but yours.

Author's note

The above laws do not, of course, apply to any of the author's current or future clients.