James Paradis - Text and Action the Operator's Manual in Context and In Court

James Paradis - Text and Action the Operator's Manual in Context and In Court

    Paradis begins his paper by discussing how a rising global population and rapid technological advancements are causing the field of technical communication to grow and become more complex. This article primarily focuses two instances where poor technical writing led to litigation. These two manuals were for a so called stud gun. This piece of construction equipment would fire a stud into wood, steel, or concrete. If used incorrectly, the stud could pass through these materials or bounce back to injure the operator. The issue with these manuals was that they did not make clear how dangerous the equipment was or that it could potentially kill someone. The inadequacies of these manuals were dissected in court to determine liability. One of the findings was that “In neither case had experienced manual writers overseen the manual writing process”. Had a professional technical writer been assigned to this manual, these incidents may have never taken place. However, Paradis argues that as technologies become more advanced, writing these instruction manuals will get increasingly difficult to produce.

    This paper was confusing at times because entire bodies of text were missing. For example, at the end of pages 156 and 159, the beginnings of the next pages don't match up. Also, on the first page, there are blank white spaces where sentences should be. In addition there were repeats of the same page even though they were labeled different page numbers. For example, page 160 and 162 were the same page. I found it interesting to think that technical writers could be liable for poor writing. When I thought about the job of a technical writer, I never considered that writing poor instructions could lead to severe injuries or death. I never realized how important technical writers are and the level of responsibility that rests on their shoulders.