Okay, here goes another lash of the whip.
I challenge the proposition that we should publish two separate reports:
one for the public and another for the profession.
Desktop publishing has given us the tools of typography, if not the skills
of typographers. We can produce an attractive and readable product that
will satisfy academic requirements, while still satisfying the needs and
desires of more casual readers.
Here's how to build a readable dual-audience report (IMHO).
First: the narrative
We are supposed to tell our reader what happened. Write the narrative in
simple declarative sentences, in chronological order. Use words that are
easily understood by everyone, choosing the more popular word wherever
possible ("stone tools" instead of "lithic implements"). If we were to
write our reports in the same language style that we use verbally among
ourselves in the bar, we would produce much better reports.
Jake Ivey made some really great points about little explanations that help
people find their way through the text. Don't assume that everyone knows
about what you are writing. It doesn't cost a thing to insert the birth and
death dates of a person, or to explain when and among whom a particular war
took place.
The Flesch Test and other measures of readability should be applied. Most
word processors can do word counts and character counts, and some can apply
formulas for readability.
Active sentences work better than passive ones. The verb "to be" in most
forms absolutely poisons readability.
First-person narrative style describes what you did. Who is going to take
you seriously if you state that "a hole was dug" on a site where obviously
the author was digging? We probably lose most of our potential
non-specialist readers when we affect the detached style of writing in the
third person. I realize that the academic pundits will defend, to the
death, the stilted style of "detached" writing. Let them die.
Second: the pararphenalia
A "technical" report must include tables and lists of things. Typography
can help here.
In old typewritten reports, tabular material was stuck right in, or
relegated to appendices. In either case, it was unreadable because
everything looked the same. Word processing and page layout technology
allow us to set tables in six-point type and box them in a corner. We can
express tabular data as graphs, and inset them into page layouts.
In our recent reports, our office has all but eliminated appendices,
instead scattering the tabular material through the text in boxes as
sidebars to the main narrative. The result is vastly more attractive than
the old appendices, and much more likely to be read, even by the
non-technical reader.
Third: the layout
DTP technology also allows us to insert typographically interesting chapter
titles and subtitles. Instead of calling the first chapter of a report
"Introduction," we called it "What we did and why we did it" and then
summarized the chapter in a three-line subhead. Section headings within
chapters can help the reader over the rough spots. Most word processors
automatically generate an index and a table of contents that takes into
account all the heading information.
We are free from the old constraint of full-page "plates" or "figures" at
fixed points in the report. Human-interest pictures of the "dig" in process
can be scattered through the text, to let the reader know that this is a
human experience that he can share through the medium of report
illustrations.
When I noticed that my site was dotted with umbrellas and canvas dining
shelters as the crew tried to survive 100-degree heat, I took a picture of
these contraptions which will appear in the printed report over the
caption, "Club Ned," together with a description of the weather conditions
on the site. Inclusion of this picture detracts not one whit from the
technical content, but it makes the report vastly more friendly to the
non-technical reader.
When I was reporting a nineteenth-century catsup factory, I inserted
recipes for modern catsup and the vastly more spicy Victorian version. The
recipes added to appreciation of the project in the sense that it even gave
a sense of time depth to the reader's palate.
Fourth: obsolete layout conventions
Guidelines for some publications still insist that plates and figures must
be numbered separately. Some journals still put the plates at the back in a
separate section on different paper.
Some CRM contractors still number the pages in each section separately.
These curious and cumbersome customs all have good explanations in obsolete
technology, and all of them are bad news on the readability front.
Back in the old days, pictures and drawings were printed by different
processes, and required different types of paper. This hasn't been the case
for at least fifty years, but some journal editors insist on keeping the
tradition alive. The result is an unnecessarily disjointed article or
report.
Back before we discarded our typewriters, each chapter of a report was
produced separately. It was very costly to retype a whole section just to
change a page number. It was unthinkable to paginate the whole report
together, in case someone should add a plate in front of page three and
throw off the whole pagination. A consecutively-paged report is much
easier to read than one with chapter page numbering, but I know at least
two firms that hang on to the old system for dear life.
I actually know one place where they still underline to indicate italics,
even though modern computer printers easily print italics.
If all these little refinements help more people appreciate archaeology, we
will benefit. But the best part about these changes is the fact that they
don't cost.
_____ +++++++++++IT'S A MAD WORLD+++++++++++
___(_____)
|Baby the\ A caller to the BBC World Service talk
|1969 Land\__===_ show Sunday morning suggested that the
| ___Rover ___|o school shootings could've been avoided
|_/ . \______/ . || by arming the teachers! Eh? Go figure.
___\_/________\_/____________________________________________
Ned Heite, Camden, DE http://home.dmv.com/~eheite/index.html
|