Fluff from the naval of my mind

I once had a friend at university, well more an associate really, who complained, ‘why can’t they write books simple enough that I can understand them?’ This is a common complaint, and the answer in many cases is as follows.

Firstly, there often are books that present simple information but the same people who complain about books not being simple enough will also complain about these books being too simple. The fact is, when you are learning a new subject it is probably going to require an effort in understanding on your part.

I read a great deal. I read a lot of technical papers that deal with my professional subject matter and even now, after twenty years of reading this sort of material, I still run into papers that take several read throughs to appreciate and fully understand. Now, I could say that the authors should have simplified their presentation, but they are addressing an audience that they, reasonably, expect to spend some time understanding the subject matter. They write in technical shorthand. They write using jargon specific to the field. And they write for an audience that they presume is expert in the field, and one which may well challenge their material. It is reasonable then that reading this material requires an effort. One must first understand it, then interpret it, then integrate it with your existing knowledge. Once this is complete, one analyses and criticises the material in light of all this comprehension.

Case in point, I recently started looking into graphs and hyper-graphs. Now, much of the material on these topics requires a good understanding of the mathematical notation around graph, group, and set theory and it has been a while since I studied this sort of thing even superficially. I looked through the papers and understood maybe 60% of the material. I had to go away and read a lot more material on the various notation methods and some ‘Janet and John’ versions of the theories before coming back and re-reading the original material. It should be no surprise that when revisiting the material after this research it all seemed much simpler than after the first read through.

The reason I bring this up is that I recently produced a paper, for a technical audience, but unfortunately I presented it to someone who was unprepared for the material. They requested it, but they were not ready for it.

The response? ‘This material took me a long time to understand.’ Well, of course it did! It was a technical subject. It dealt with some difficult concepts. And it was written for a technically competent audience.

Once the reader in question had grasped the content of the paper he concluded that it was very good. Very clear even. Before reaching this condition though he complained that the paper was ‘too difficult’.

He complained that he could not present this information to a non-technical audience. And I agreed. This particular paper was not written for a non-technical audience. He had not requested that the material be accessible to such an audience.

One writes to a specific audience. In my own field I present to many different audiences. Presenting to developers is different to presenting to process engineers. Presenting to project managers is different to presenting to company directors. There is no one presentation that can be given to all audiences because there is no one message that can be universally presented to all audiences — each audience has its own agenda, its own existing knowledge on the topic, and its own required outcomes.

Bottom line, if you read something and do not understand it, do as I do; reread, research, or abandon.  Try reading the material through again, it may make more sense once you have the entire message in mind. If you encounter specific concepts or topics in the material that you do not understand, go away an research those topics. Revisit the material once you are confident you have a grasp of this underlying material to understand the original topic. Finally, if you do not understand something, and it is not really important to you, put it aside and focus on something important.