TCUK online - Ciaran Dodd - ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English - Let us show you how! Transcript, AI Summary & Key Points

00:00 uh yes today we have kieran dodd talking to us about simplified technical simplified technical english uh thank you very much kieran uh for coming along today so welcome everyone thank you for uh joining us for this lunchtime session on ste i do recognize some names so do say hello in chat if you wish i'm not going to jump on you and point you out so for those who don't know me my name's kieran dodd i am the uk ste maintenance group member the uk st main or the maintenance group are the body of people from companies

00:39 all over europe and uh the us in fact all over the world who maintain and update the ste specification and i joined as the uk rep last year when the previous uk representative retired as part of that role i'm also chair of the uk st working group and that's a body that we are looking to grow actually because the idea is that if you are involved in ste or are interested in ste we meet four times a year and it's a way of putting your changes into the ste maintenance group so that you can make any suggestions for change

01:23 as i say here's my contact details and i'll give these to you again at the end of the session what i propose to do today is to demonstrate how to apply ste principles to a warning and a procedure that i took from a hurricane manual that was um written and republished by this this author here d sarkar so if you want any more information you can get hold of that but that's where i've taken these examples from my involvement in ste goes right back to well it's almost exactly 20 years i got involved in ste when i was at

02:10 rolls-royce in the aerospace division and at the time the technical authors did the training themselves in what was then atmos simplified english i was trained and delivered there as well as to all sorts of other organizations you can see it became what we now know is asd st 100 in 2005 when the asd organization took it over we're on issue seven at the moment but issue eight we're in the process of finalizing so that's due out at the end of april so if you currently do use ste you need to make sure that you get a

02:49 download of the latest version in at the end of april and as i say i've become the maintenance group member last year so for those of you who aren't familiar with ste or didn't uh weren't able to attend mike's on michael waller's presentation on ste last month just briefly ste is known as an international specification it's a complete document that gives you rules uh for writing technical documentation in a controlled language what that actually means is that it restricts the complexity of the language that you can

03:39 both write and use and the way that it does this is by combining some very precise rules words that it provides and principles that underpin both and they all work together to give you guidance for writing a much more simplified way of writing so what does it actually look like so here are a couple of uh examples of pages from the specification if you ever print it out it's it's more than 300 pages long although it's a bit more manageable looks a bit more manageable when you have it on a pdf to to use st properly or to

04:22 get the full benefit of st you need to know how the rules and the dictionary and the underlying principles all work together many a time i've met someone who's new to sde and they have been given the specification and have just focused on the writing rules or sorry on the dictionary at the back but you need to have the writing rules and understand the principles in order to make sense of what you are neat to make sense of the specification in order to get the benefit of it so part one is where all of the rules are

05:03 currently there are 53 rules in nine sections i don't anticipate a lot of change in that for issue eight this is a page from section one which tells you which words you can use you can see that the rules are summarized that there are some examples underneath which are very useful when you're when you're learning ste and you can use as a pattern for your own writing there's explanation here and you'll see that the rules refer both to each other so there's reference here to the the controlled dictionary in part two and

05:46 also to the supporting principles the here's an example from the dictionary of approved words i like this example because it illustrates uh some of the challenges that you have when you first come to ste so the the dictionary is divided into four excuse uh my dog is welcoming a delivery driver so the dictionary is split into four columns like any uh dictionary you have the keyword here but another part of it is that you need to know your parts of speech because that determines whether you can use or not use a

06:29 particular word anything in lowercase you cannot use anything in uppercase you can use so in this instance for example fold is not permitted as a noun so i couldn't say make a fold in the material but i can in the second column it tells me what i can use as an alternative i can use fold that's in capitals as a verb and here you can see examples of how you can and can't use the word fold so if i want to see how i can use fold i then look underneath and i see folders in capitals as a verb or an action and these are the

07:10 forms of verb that i can use and that's it also it tells me what ste has given as a meaning to this particular word so in this case it means to double over or to cause to double over on itself so if i'd wanted to write make a fold in the material it's telling me that i can still use fold with this meaning but i have to change the way i write and use it as a verb so if i was writing the instruction i might say fold the material so what this illustrates is a number of principles you'll see that when st was first

07:50 developed and as a as it and is an evolving practice as we keep updating the specification is we review the words that are in the dictionary to check if they are still relevant to check if their meanings are clear to check if they fit with current practice so you can imagine that we've over the years added a lot of words that deal with technology to match the pace of change in technology and the other thing those who've been looking at ste for a long time will know is that it started as a standard for aerospace and

08:28 over the years it has become less and less aerospace focused and more applicable to all sectors and so for people like me doing training that makes it a lot easier because instead of having to work around the fact that it was aerospace focused for other industries it's now much easier to apply the other example i like though is um follow because even if say i wanted to write follow this procedure to change the part so i look in the dictionary and the first thing i see that follow is in capital letters so i get excited

09:09 then i check it's part of speech it's a verb i can do that but then i go and check the meaning and this is where again you have control because i can't use follow in the sense that i intended because in ste it's been given the meaning to come after and again we've got examples of how you can use it all in capitals so to mean come after so you can see here that if i wanted to write uh follow this procedure i'd have to either use obey this procedure to change the part or do the procedure that follows to change the part

09:49 so what i like about sde is that if you are new for right to writing or you need to have a lot of discipline from a translation point of view what it does is it gives you a clear set of of rules and a vocabulary to help you to know what you can and can't write and also anybody who's using ste can come and look at the dictionary and make sure that they are understanding the terms in the correct way the other thing it illustrates with the principles is you have one word has one meaning typically there are exceptions but

10:29 in most cases one word has one meaning one word has one part of speech we try to be consistent and we try to be precise in our in our writing and we also try to be concrete rather than abstract and what what the st gives you is consistency and structure in your writing which is for me very important when you're trying to write clearly or for a global audience or if you are trying to get good quality base text for translation so that gives you an outline of what the specification looks like i'm first going to give you a

11:16 warning as i say i have taken from the hurricane manual and what i want to do is to illustrate to you some of the challenges in this piece of text now bearing in mind it's a a good number of years old but i do still see at times examples of this style of writing so when i come to a piece of text and i'm thinking about ste this is almost visualizing for you what's happening in my head when i look at a piece of text so the first thing this is a warning which is a safety instruction so in aerospace and in ste a warning

12:00 means injury to personnel or death now a new uh feature of ste in issue 17 was that this was safety instructions were made much broader so there's a recognition that because this specification is now for use in all sectors besides aerospace and defense although the um the rules kind of focus on warnings and cautions in the examples we recognize that other industries use different um safety instruction ways of illustrating hazards so that's fine within ste so the first thing that i notice section seven gives me the

12:43 rules on safety instructions and ste requires you to start a warning or caution with a clear command so you're telling the person what to do or not do in order to keep safe and here we've got this waffly it is extremely important to note that before we get anywhere so that is definitely not ste we've got a passive voice uh construction being used here which is not permitted in ste it's not permitted at all in procedural texts or warnings and cautions safety instructions and as little as possible in descriptive text so

13:22 that's not not permitted as a verb form neither is the ing form of the verb that's not permitted the ruling there is it tends to be can be confusing can be ambiguous and so it is not permitted unless it's part of a technical name another element we have is that your sentences need to be restricted to 20 word maximum in procedural text and 25 in descriptive so this is too long for a safety instruction we also from the section five on procedural text and safety instructions counters procedural text so you have to use the

14:14 imperative author command form when you start with your command in the safety instruction it needs to use the imperative verb form which is what you would see in any procedure or for example in a recipe where it says mix add those are all what we call the command forms where we assume the u before the action the semicolon is not permitted in ste that's explicitly not permitted otherwise you can use any other normal standard punctuation in ste and finally you've got a number of words that are not approved so this has

14:58 all been from the rules in section one and then up here you've got some not approved words which uh rule 1.1 specifies which words you can use and i've just picked out one or two here that are not permitted in ste so i'm going to give to you now three different versions of the same warning but in simplified technical english all are connect technically correct in ste but i would like you to tell me in chat which letter warning you prefer please and if you can why why do you prefer a b or c so if you want to put your

15:47 answers in chat please i'll be interested to see what you think james has gone for a mighty b b clearer and smaller okay b a because it's the sequence you do things cecily yeah b and that b a because the condition comes before the instruction another a answer b is a clear command okay so c is not pos uh not at all popular and then i'd say we've probably got an even split between a and b and for the reasons that you have said in the in the last two or three courses i've done recently b's been more popular because it

16:41 gives you the clear command first but equally people tend or i absolutely agree with with mike and mark and those of you who've gone for a because you've got the condition first so what we're saying is before you do anything release the pressure so it indicates to you that some of that there's still a lot of discretion when you write an ste and you fundamentally as the author have to think about what's going to work for the audiences that you are writing for so there's not a right or wrong you as the author would have

17:20 to make that decision uh depending on who you're writing for with your audiences so thank you for your points of view the second example i wanted to show you in exactly the same way is this example of the procedure again it's from the same hurricane manual and i literally just took out the exit and added it in to this presentation so again normally i would like to ask you what you think is wrong with it but in interest of time and giving you opportunities to ask questions i'm going to illustrate again to you what i

18:03 would identify as being issues with this piece of procedural text so the first thing i would pick out is that we we know from the previous example that you should have a 20 word maximum in procedural text and most of these steps are longer than those 20 words and you can see we've got a whopper at 40 step 1 at 38 words and just by looking at that text it's quite over overwhelming and hard to see what you need to do or not do so clearly that's not very user friendly another example or issue that we need to pick up and

18:48 this comes from section five on procedural text that there is more than one instruction in each sentence an st requires you to have one instruction in each sentence unless you have two two actions happening at the same time so for example if you had to open a panel to gain access and then to make an adjustment you could put both of those steps in one sentence but the general rule is one sentence one action and that makes the writing much easier to read and much easier for the for the user to find what they need to do

19:31 another issue here again we've got a semicolon that's popped in here and we know that's not permitted in ste more passive voice again that's very much a feature of traditional engineering writing and i say we're going back a long way with this text but i still see a lot of passive writing in um in standard english text these days and it makes your writing less crisp less clear and potentially you can hide a lot of unclear thinking in writing in the passive voice which is why it's not permitted lots of words here that

20:12 aren't permitted i've listed a few there and the other issue again i said to you one of the key principles is being consistent so here in this particular example of text you've got different ways of referring to the same thing so it's called the hand pump reservoir in one place it's called the reservoir level somewhere else and the fluid level so it's really important that you are consistent when you're referring to parts or or elements in a procedure so that your reader can follow the logic of what you're saying so

20:53 again i have made some corrections and aimed to put this in ste probably you need to go back and tease out exactly what what the procedure is that the original text is describing but what i've tried to do on the right hand side is to illustrate how you can use the ste principles to make it clearer have a read through and let me know what you think about the ste version on the right hand side do you like it do you not is it easier to read put your thoughts in chat please they probably do have more than 20 words done as

21:42 i say i'd need to go back and refine the whole process your ideal with ste is that you take out the nice to have and only keep the need to have and i don't know enough about the hydraulic system to do that so you're quite right don it needs some more refining so alex you say much better clearer definition between each action james you notice there's a question mark let me have a look yes that question mark is there because i'm not entirely sure what the step was uh thank you terry after so much easier to understand

22:18 yeah much better especially having individual steps that makes such a big difference cecily okay yo can you say you've got the and in the second yeah that's a tricky one because it's repeating in action but you can't say to redo something so again i i would need to know more about this procedure to improve it two three and four yeah the point of that mari is that you are repeating an action until you get to a certain level and you can't say redo it so um that's why it's it's perhaps not as clear but when you look at

22:56 the previous example it's trying to do something over and over again uh possibly you can jane split it into two i'd have to review it but much easier to follow the logic in ste can you use repeat i've got my specification here so i shall just have a quick look for you no it's usually again i'm sure mike will be able to michael waller will be able to tell me this quickly repeat no repeat is again you can't use repeat you have to use again hence why i've tried to formulate it the way that i have so in the interest of

23:39 allowing time for questions what i wanted to do is just to sort of say if you're talking about implementing simplified technical english which i think somebody mentioned in the introduction in an ideal world if you're doing a full implementation what you'll do is is look at your typical documents and one way of doing an implementation is to start with a specific project rather than trying to do the whole thing all at once but if you first of all think about what do i actually need to say and what is the nice to have

24:15 because ste works more effectively if you focus on what you need to have not the nice to have the second thing is that ideally you will identify your terms that you use within your organization because although ste gives a dictionary approved words you have to create using some rules in section one which if you want me to explain i can do how you incorporate your own organization's terms into ste and so in order to do that and to be compliant with st particularly if you're going to use some sort of checking software

24:58 you need to have agreed terms and that can be the same in a project as it is if you're looking at your whole organization the most important thing is that you have training because as i said to you people tend to just focus on the dictionary but actually to get the benefit of ste and the discipline you need to know all of the rules all of the words or how you use the words and the principles to get the full benefit of writing in ste and then finally to make ste stick like any change it's about embedding the processes

25:37 providing support doing any change management you need to do notifying anybody else is going to be using ste because commonly people do the std training but it's the authors and yet the impact from the rest of the organization almost works against the authors particularly for example if they if they get their information from subject matter experts and so if the engineers are used to seeing things in one way and then you write an ste and go back and get asked them to check it and the subject matter experts will say

26:13 yeah but that's not what i said and so it's um it's important to be able to uh to do that by managing change so um but i can talk more about that but ste and the maintenance group on their website will say the first thing that you need to have is training because and i've taken this from um the frequently asked questions on the on the maintenance group website but to write well in ste you need good technical knowledge now whether that comes from you as the writer or you have subject matter experts to give that to you

26:51 but you still need to be able to as i showed you with the um the procedure just then you've got to understand roughly what's required from the technical information in order to put it effectively in sde you need to have a good command of the english language you need to have a full understanding of st the writing rules and the dictionary you need to be able to identify which words you can use as technical names and technical verbs and i know that um a couple of people have said in chat you're interested in that so i'll

27:27 deal with that in a moment and you need to be able to structure your thoughts logically to express what you need because and what the reader needs because ste because it's so precise there's no room for rubbish if you write unclearly it's not going to work in ste so you have to be really focused on what you're writing so typically when i do my ste training we'll talk about developing an st mindset if you like which focuses on thinking about how do we get the best from ste and then we go through all the rules with lots

28:04 of opportunities to practice doing activities like the ones we've just done here on the presentation and then we give you opportunities to um look at your own documents as well so i've got a couple of questions coming now so if you want to put any questions that you've got in chat and then lastly before my screen disappears if you need to or would like to request the st specification if you go to this website and go to the request page that's where you can request the specification for free it doesn't cost you anything

28:45 um issue eight as i say is due out on the 30th of april this year so um bear in mind that that's the case make a note in your diary if you are planning to use ste going forward you'll need the new issue and here's my email address if you want to know anything else about ste or if you'd like to get involved in the working group for example but um before we get on to that uh question so mari you asked would you be interested in how to define agreed terms if others also are okay so i said let me go back to this point so

29:28 here it says to identify which words you can use as technical names and technical verbs so the what you need to know for that if we go back to um the very first slide that i had there that's the one i want so if you look here so i picked this slide specifically because it says rule point one this tells you which words you can use in ste and you've got three categories of words words that are approved in the dictionary so i showed you an example of that page earlier words that behave as technical names and words that

30:08 behave as technical verbs so the the rules for technical names and technical verbs are also in section one so rules that are technical names are in effect words that you might use in your organization and they must fit into one of 19 categories so for example you've got very specific categories like names in the official parts information so for example if you've got an illustrated parts catalog or an engineering drawing that is the central source of names for your parts in your organization then you could put your

30:51 names into category one and they would become your technical terms it's important that when you define your technical terms that you also if you can define the non-approved versions so that everybody's clear what the name is going to be other categories are for example names of tools and support equipment names of materials consumables and any unwanted material that you might get left over in processes you've got more general ones like mathematical scientific and engineering terms parts of the body names of official

31:33 documents and parts of documentation so there's a whole set of 19 categories into which you must put any technical terms that you want to use and the reason for this is as it says in the paragraph underneath the dictionary does not include technical names as approved words because there are too many and each manufacturer uses different technical names and indeed different sectors so ste gives you a list of categories with examples to help you use technical names correctly and similarly if you want to talk about let's

32:12 say manufacturing or operational uh verbs doing words actions then again in rule 1.12 there are same principles a set of categories that you can use into which you can put your specific terms so you've got a set of manufacturing processes so if it's removing material you might have drill grind change the surface finish of a material to polish it only gives examples in the specification but any that you can put in if you can legitimately put them in the category then that's how you make the terms work so once you

32:54 understand that you can see how versatile ste is it's a bit a bit difficult to get get your head around in the beginning but once you understand that you can see how versatile ste is for all industries outside of aerospace and defense does that answer your question mari and jane just put a yes in chat if it does brilliant anybody else got any questions or anything you want to share with me to ask about ste happy for you to jump on the mic if you would like to what i'd like to suggest then um is perhaps if i end the

33:30 recording here and then people can feel free to to jump into more of a discussion type and q a section okay let everyone know i'm doing that now