The Engineer’s Curse (of Confusing Documentation)
There’s a moment that stops everything in the field.
There’s a moment that stops everything in the field.
You’re standing in front of a panel. Something’s wrong. The tech on the line is flipping through the manual. And then he freezes.
Not because the problem is hard.
But because the manual is.
Here’s what he’s staring at:
“The non-operational status of the auxiliary indicator may be present in the event of absent primary feedback response.”
He doesn’t say anything.
He just looks at me.
And I say:
"It means the light might be off if the other sensor isn’t working."
Why does this happen?
Because engineers know the system.
They understand why things work.
But they’re not trained to explain them for people who don’t.
So they use language that reflects their logic, their models, their stack of if-this-then-that conditions.
Which means you get sentences full of:
passive verbs
nested logic
backwards cause-and-effect
uncommon phrasing like “may be required to initiate pre-engagement” instead of “Turn it on.”
These phrases make perfect sense to the person who wrote them.
But they add layers of mental translation for the person who reads them.
And that’s dangerous. Time consuming. A waste.
Words can cause delay.
Not just in production, but in troubleshooting, safety, and support.
The longer your reader spends reinterpreting a sentence, the longer it takes to make the right decision.
Those seconds are always important. They always matter.
What do we do about it?
We don’t rewrite technical details.
We don’t dumb it down.
We rebuild the structure so the information follows how the user thinks—not how the system operates.
We choose simpler words—not to simplify the meaning, but to clarify it.
We test our instructions—and if someone pauses before they act, we fix the part that caused the pause.
Because “technically correct” isn’t enough.
The real test is:
Does the reader know what to do next?
If your documentation still sounds like it was written by the machine, it’s time to translate it for the human.
That’s what I help with.
Message me directly or check out my process on The Writing Sample. Let’s build documents that actually work.