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Redaction-technique.org

KISS Principle of Simplicity

By Olivier Carrère

The KISS principle isn’t unique to technical writing. It is a general engineering rule: anything people build, hardware or software, is more reliable and easier to maintain and extend when its complexity is kept deliberately low. The Shadocks - the absurd birds of the cult French cartoon - put the opposite case just as memorably: Why keep it simple when you can keep it complicated?

The principle was decisive in the design of the Swatch, whose specifications called for half as many parts as a comparable watch. The payoff: a watch that was cheaper, more reliable, and easy to reissue in an endless stream of new versions.

What worked for watches works just as well for technical documentation. Whatever the format, a writer can build something cleanly structured or a Rube Goldberg machine of a document. In DITA XML, that mostly means resisting the urge to centralize conrefs or nest them too deeply - the very traps described in a document architecture that’s too complex? In FrameMaker it is easier still to go wrong: with few guardrails, multiplying styles and overrides quickly produces a document no one can manage.

The same goes for sentences, and the writer should keep KISS in view with every one of them. Convoluted sentences are easy to produce, and more often than not they betray a shaky grasp of the subject rather than refined prose. A simple sentence is harder: it takes real effort to understand the material - which is exactly why testing the product is so valuable. Once you understand it, writing clearly for the reader becomes easy. That is the heart of the job, and where the technical writer adds real value to the product.

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