Posted on March 11, 2025 (week 7)

This video highlights that authors make many assumptions about what their audience will understand. Authors often rely on their audiences to make “common sense” deductions and inferences consonant with their intended meaning. However, that does not always happen. While this example was contrived, it does a great job illustrating dissonance between author expectations and reader interpretations. An author may believe they have described an object or process with sufficient detail and precision of language. For example, referencing the jam bottle, one of the kids instructed, “Squeeze it onto the other piece of bread.” But interpretations between a writer and their readers can differ wildly. In this case, the dad managed to find an unconventional interpretation of that instruction revealing that what seemed to be a straightforward imperative was an insufficiently detailed one. 

Since this video is essentially an example of a technical description, it relates directly to our assignment. It demonstrates the importance of detail and precision of language in writing, especially instructional writing. The challenge was simple, and our choice of object for this assignment will likely be deceptively simple too. But “simplicity” is borne out of assumptions about “common sense” and existing knowledge. What is simple to one person might not be for another. Ultimately, this video showed that a simple procedure encapsulates a surprising amount of complexity. It is the difficult job of a writer to penetrate through their own assumptions to write clear, detailed instructions for “simple” tasks as we will have to for our Technical Description. 

This video (and the lab report assignment) did influence how I view technical communication. It is becoming more and more apparent to me that high levels of detail and precision of language are required in this genre of writing. The video also made me think more about the audience, an important element of the rhetorical situation. The intended audience colors an author’s entire approach to writing a technical piece, determining what kind of jargon they can use, how much context they need to include about a topic, and what assumptions they can safely make about the reader.  

This specific aspect of the rhetorical situation may explain why the children struggled so much to write clear, detailed instructions: They misread their audience, assuming their dad would approach the problem in a “normal” way, using his knowledge to fill in the gaps. Instead, he acted as if he had never made a PB&J sandwich before and even got creative with ways to interpret their instructions. Knowing the audience is crucial to successfully writing for them.