Rhetorical Strategies: Making Form Follow Function in Effective Writing

My first apartment as a college student, had a 90-degree turn as soon as you entered the front door. It was of ubiquitous and conventional design for such cheap apartments. It also meant that bringing a sofa through the front door was impossible. The only way to get a couch into the place was to take it through the patio door around back—and only if you took the door apart. Obviously, back in those days, architects of cheap student housing never studied the adage that “Form follows function.”

The relationship between form of a piece of writing and its content is similar. The structure of the work must be designed to support the content in order to be effective.

Take, for example, the owner’s manual sitting in the glove pocket in the dashboard of your car. Despite what manufacturer’s think, no new car owner ever sits down with the owner’s manual and reads it cover to cover like a good novel. Indeed, most of us never look at the thing unless we have a question (or crisis, God forbid) regarding the running or servicing of our vehicle. So even though the writing of such manuals has much improved over the years, there’s still way too much prose in them to be effective.

What makes for a good car owner’s manual is indexing; i.e., the ability to look up and find answers to questions quickly and easily. Say, for example, your windshield wipers stop working, so you look at the table of contents, which may have a chapter on dashboard controls telling you how to turn the windshield wipers on and off, but, hey, do we really need and manual to tell us that? No, we want to find out why they’re not working. Looking in the index, we are referred to the chapter on dashboard controls. But then we have an “ah-hah” moment and think that maybe we have blown a fuse or maybe a circuit. There’s nothing in the table of contents about that, but searching the index we find tables of circuit breakers and fuses. If we are lucky, by perusing these tables we might discover whether the windshield wipers have a fuse or a circuit breaker, maybe what type and where it is located in the car. But what if that’s not the problem? Perusing the manual at that point is a waste of time.

Ever try to put together a kid’s tricycle on Christmas Eve by following the directions written in a kind of English referring to parts that you’ve never heard before? The fallback position is to look at the pictures on the box and do your best. This is a failure of the writer and the documentation.

I was once in an Emergency Room in a hospital waiting to get my dislocated toe put back in place when I spied a protocol taped to the wall about how to treat serious burns. This is a true story. The protocol was written in passive voice in a big block of text. No, two things disturbed me about this: First, does a ER physician really need to stop and read the protocol before getting to work? Second, passive voice does not lend itself to getting something active done. If you want someone to do something, then use the imperative mood as in the revision below:

Passive

When treating a serious burn, the following steps are undertaken: Any loose clothing on or near the burn must be removed. The area around the burn must be washed. The injury should be covered with a clean dressing. The dressing should be secured with tape. Burned fingers or toes must be separated with gauze to prevent them from sticking together. Prescribed medicine can only be applied if prescribed by a doctor.

Active

In the following rewrite, the listed instructions about how to handle such a crucial situation are clear and easy for the reader to understand and follow:

Treatment of a serious burn requires the following action:

1.     Remove any loose clothing on or near the burn.

2.     Wash the area around the burn.

3.     Cover the injury with a clean dressing.

4.     Secure the dressing with tape.

5.     Separate burned fingers or toes with gauze or cloth to prevent them from

6.     sticking together.

7.     Apply only doctor-prescribed medication.

The first word of each step, an imperative verb form, informs the person in charge about exactly what to do and when. Furthermore, this active version omits the wordiness, has conciseness, and provides the proper emphasis.

The ramifications of this simple concept are huge. For example, when I worked in Regulatory Documentation for the biopharmaceutical industry, application of this principle was of prime importance. For example, most teams going to an FDA Advisory Committee when asked about Serious Adverse Events (SAE) in a clinical trial will bring up a slide showing all of the SAE’s involved. Doing so creates noise. It’s is better to put up the ones that impact patients’ health or are otherwise relevant—given that many SAE’s as part of a class effect are to be expected. Imagine how much noise exists in thousands of pages submitted in a New Drug Application (NDA) for review.

The same is true in fiction as it is in non-fiction. Think about why Bram Stoker’s Dracula was written as an epistolary narrative or how William Faulkner uses point of view in The Sound and the Fury. These choices were not made my accident. The form is an integral part of the story-telling.

Form Follows Function means that the structural presentation of a piece of writing has an “organic” relationship the desired impact on the reader in support of effective communication whether artistic, technological, or educational.