MIT Professor of Writing and Comparative Media Studies, James Paradis, wrote a novel called Textual Dynamics of the Professions. Within his novel, in chapter 11, Paradis concentrates on the topic of poorly written manuals and the consequences they can have in a court of law and in a person’s everyday life. Specifically, Paradis focuses on two lawsuits that revolved around the poorly written operator’s manual for a studgun, which combines the effects of a hammer and a firearm and is used in construction to project nails and pins into concrete objects.

 

With such a powerful and potentially dangerous tool, one would imagine a thorough and in-depth operator’s manual; however, in these two separate instances, the operator of the studgun did not receive proper safety warnings from their manuals, which ultimately led to paralysis in one operator and the death of the other. Because of these disastrous results, Paradis argues that the operator manuals did not have the four textual elements that “attempt to bind, by means of representative human actions, the worlds of external objects with those of human behavior” (p. 258). The four elements in which he sees as bridges for human action and technical objects construct, what Paradis calls, a “teleological view of reality” (p. 258) and are as follows:

 

1. The author creates analogies that relate to the tool or situation. This makes the tool or its process appear familiar and similar to other acts.

2. The author creates an “everyman,” meaning there is a character who represents the everyday worker who is capable of using this complex machinery.

3. The author constructs a safe environment for the tool’s use. Giving exact conditions for when it is the safest to use the tool or perform an action.

4. The author clearly articulates the steps requires for using the tool or a set of definitions that relate to the tool’s operation.  

 

Using these important four steps allows an author to construct an effective operator’s manual. Unfortunately, in two different situations, the operator’s manual was not effective in articulating.

 

Roger Gagne v. Power Anchor Corporation et al.

 

In this case, Roger Gagne was working on a construction site and was tasked with using the studgun in order to attach a wooden window frame. Gagne had an operator’s card with him at the time for the studgun, but his other co-workers with him at the time did not. When he fired the studgun, a fastener rebounded off an object in the concrete and hit him in the back of the neck. As a result, Gagne could not return to work.

 

DuCharme v. Star Expansion Corporation

 

The second case takes place with an aircraft company. In this situation, an employee was killed by a studgun mishap when the stud struck the employee after passing through corrugated steel, a steel beam, and plywood. This situation was the result of two employees who did not have an operator’s license and were simply testing the studgun’s power and suitability.

 

As a result of poorly written manuals, serious legal and health issues arose. Paradis uses these two examples to articulate that those manuals without a how-to framework for using tools and lack a rhetorical purpose will lead to serious legal problems.

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In both situations, neither operator was using the device correctly even though they thought they were. Furthermore, their studguns had no safety warning attached to them, nor was there a warning in the safety manual about possible bodily injury of death as a result of the device’s misuse. It would be simple to blame the workers for their misuse; however, as Paradis notes, “Written discourse plays a necessary role in the exportations of expertise, whether of simple casual consumer technologies or of complex instruments of institutional proportions” (p. 264). And in these situations, the expertise regarding the use of a studgun was not properly articulated.

 

However, after reading this piece, I became very concerned regarding my own abilities to fully articulate a situation or product. In the first court case, they a made a point that the operator had fired “closer than three inches from the edge of the two-by-four-inch wood frame into the concrete substrate” (p. 260). The author of first court case manual had “cautioned against firing ‘closer than 3 in. in concrete’” (p. 260). The one difference between the situation and the manual is that there was wood frame considered in the situation instead of just a concrete substance. A minor detailed that resulted in a man’s paralysis.

 

Although the message of this piece was geared toward understanding the importance of technical writing in a legal scene, the message I primarily came away with is that it is difficult to simplify technical information into something that appears to be common sense. An operation manual needs to be accessible to individuals with varying educational backgrounds and various understandings of English. This tasks can have enormous implications on an individual’s health, even their life.

 

The reason I was not as surprised about the legal implications of an operator’s manual is because the entire Bill of Rights can be misinterpreted based on the placement of a comma. This is the particular case for the second amendment’s interpretation. Within a court of law, any piece of literature can be used as evidence and of significant importance when making a decision. Therefore, it is no surprise that an operator’s manual can and will be used against you in a court of law.

 

Overall, I found Paradis’ piece to be rather bland while talking about a very important and interesting topic. This conversation could have been organized and articulated in a much more interesting manner. The section headlines were very ambiguous and the content for each section was very long and drawn out. Although he selected two interesting and important court cases to bring attention to this important topic, I don’t think he did the topic justice. Nevertheless, this piece has definitely scared me from being a lazy technical writer, one that thinks leaving out common sense details is an appropriate thing to do. Instead, this piece has brought to light how important it is to articulate something even if it seems like common sense.

 

Reference

 

Paradis, James. "Text and Action: The Operators manual in Context and In Court." p. 256 - 276. September 25, 2016.