A Near-Perfect Picture (Ep. 7)
Sampling theory for technical article-writing • Conceptual resolution
It's summer. It's holiday season. So I'd like to share a picture I took of this beautiful scene in the countryside. The bridge peacefully straddling the rushing waterfall:
You can see the crispness in the air and the water spray rising towards the onlookers on the bridge. You can almost feel the calmness of this place.
Just a second… Some of you are telling me you can't see the image properly? It's a poor-quality image, you're saying? That's a shame! It means you can't see the beauty I was experiencing. I wish I could share it with you properly.
Sampling our thoughts • A good technical article starts with a clear idea of the topic in the author's head. That in itself is not a trivial step, but one I'll talk about another day.
The next challenge is to represent that idea in words. The written article is a representation of the author's ideas, but it's at a "lower resolution" than the raw thoughts that reside in the author's head. If that resolution is too low, we end up in a similar situation to the low-resolution image I shared with you earlier. You couldn't quite see what I saw when I looked at the bridge straddling the waterfall.
Our job as technical writers is to convert our ideas into writing using the highest resolution possible. Let's call this the conceptual resolution to carry on the analogy with spatial resolution from the imaging domain—apologies for getting a bit technical here.
If you can sample your ideas with a high conceptual resolution, your readers can form a picture close enough to the one you have in your head. But if the conceptual resolution is low, the audience will get a blurry vision of what you're thinking and what you want to convey to them.
From optics to writing • In a previous life, I worked as a scientist in the optics domain. I dealt with optical resolution daily. This is why I'm using the optical resolution analogy in this post. I'm probably breaking one of my own analogy rules (see Whizzing Through Wormholes (Ep. 2)) by using an example from a technical field—optics—to explain another concept. An analogy ought to "describe an everyday scenario that everybody understands" is what I wrote a few weeks ago.
Since I've already broken my own rule, I'll go further still…
Conceptual diffraction limit • In optical imaging systems, there's a fundamental limit to the resolution of an image called the diffraction limit. Even a "perfect" optical imaging system is not really perfect, and the resolution has an upper limit depending on several properties of the imaging system. A diffraction-limited optical system is the best you can hope for in any scenario.
The written article will never be a perfect representation of the thoughts in our heads. No matter how masterfully it is used, language will probably always stop short of conveying the full clarity of our thoughts.
Instead, when we write a technical article, we should aim for the conceptual diffraction limit—the best-possible representation in words of the ideas we have in our head.
That's easy enough to say. But so many key ingredients are required for anyone's writing to approach this theoretical limit. Breaking the Rules is about exploring as many of these ingredients as possible.
As mentioned earlier, the raw idea we have in our head must also be clear and coherent in the first place. Otherwise, not even conceptual diffraction-limited writing will convey much. It's like getting a professional photographer, using a high-quality camera, to take a photo of a blank, white wall. The photo won't convey much, even though the resolution is high!
Conceptual sampling theorem • I've probably lost most of my audience by this stage of this post. If you're still here (well done), let's go deeper and look at another result from my former profession. The sampling theorem roughly states that a minimum sampling resolution is required to reconstruct the original signal. We could extend a conceptual version of this theorem to state that there's a minimum conceptual resolution needed in an author's writing for an ideal reader to recreate the ideas the author is attempting to convey.
I should probably scrap that paragraph and re-write it. But I won't.
Afterword • I was struggling to write this post for weeks. And the result is probably a post that's not as clear as I would have hoped. I haven't fully managed, I feel, to paint a clear picture of the mental image I have of this concept. I don't need to point out the irony of this, of course…
I'll write again about this in the future.
