 My name's Fred. As he mentioned I run WP shout and press up Okay, we're talking about technical communication. What is that? It's explaining hard things to humans and we're gonna break down each piece of that. Hold on. I'm actually taller than this All right. Okay. Um That feel when you're too tall for that. Okay. All right. So hard things to humans explaining hard things to humans What are hard things? There are things that take a lot of specific technical knowledge knowledge that is basically unrelated to human intuition So, you know if you were traveling to a new country and somebody said, oh, you know Just be your normal self, but maybe be a little bit quieter. That's considered polite That's sort of that's got a lot of human intuition in it. That's not technical But if somebody said yeah, just write a WP custom WP query unless you know the exact nature of how to do that You don't under you you don't know where to start. That's technical knowledge. It basically has no relationship to human intuition Explaining what does this mean? It means conveying knowledge effectively enough that a specific goal is achieved So people need information to be able to do things now for for a coworker They might need to know everything you know about a particular topic, but for a client the goal might be Just that they have enough general information to have the intuition. They need to make a decision So explaining means that you you solved somebody's problem, whatever the nature of that problem Who are humans? Well, they're imperfectly rational They learn differently. They don't like to feel like the only person in the room. It doesn't know what's going on they don't like to be talked down to and Not only is the person you need to explain stuff to a human, but you yourself are a human and that's that's the tricky part So and then why does technical communication matter? Well again, you know we mentioned goals, right? My cousin says he can totally build this site with Yahoo's free page builder in language I can understand tell me why I should pay you any money to do it, right? I mean goals if you want to get this guy on as a client, which you maybe don't Yeah, you know WordPress sounds great for this project, but my boss is really worried Don't people say isn't WordPress easy to hack, right? Hey, I bought your premium plug-in, but I want my money back I hate your documentation. I can't understand a word of it Okay, so what is technical knowledge? Well, we're gonna use an analogy here. Technical knowledge is like being on a hill I actually found a picture of a hill. Here's the hill and I'm gonna sort of diagram it out for you So here's you right at the top of the hill from the top of the hill. You can see a view, right? There's the hill that you climbed to get to the top and then the sort of default before you climb the hill Is the valley and that's where most people live and they are of course the valley people So the hill and you Getting up the hill took effort, right? It's not a trivial process You had to walk every step of it up from the valley where we all start up to the top But now that you're up there There's an amazing view you can see and do all kinds of cool stuff You can see the weather forming a thousand miles away You have superpowers basically and those that stuff you can do the the stuff that the view enables you to do You're passionate about that's why you climbed the hill in the first place Now the valley well It's a wonderful place to be for any piece of technical knowledge like 99% of people are in the valley, right? So it's it's the default on the only thing is the valley sometimes needs hilltop information And that could mean you either need to provide instructions for climbing the hill or a lot more commonly You need to provide a report from the top of the hill describing the view in language that valley people can understand Why is this difficult well gaps in knowledge and one thing I want to point out is that we sometimes treat gaps and knowledge like there's just specific pieces of information that people need but The way that gaps and knowledge chunk together is that eventually there are entire Context just whole sort of domains of information that are separating you and the people you need to communicate with So it's not like oh if I could just communicate these ten facts It's more like if I could communicate the underlying sort of knowledge base Then I could even could communicate the ten facts and here's an example, right? Hey, look the permafrost is thinning on the peaks of the western mountain range that on the valley They're thinking okay permafrost peaks mountain range, right? They have no idea what you're talking about What is this? Lead to and in sort of the worst case it leads to attitude problems And what I'm talking about is attitude problems that you have as a technical person the first one is arrogance I am actually only interested in speaking to other people on this particular hilltop, right? What does this look like arrogance? Has anybody ever found a talk to an arrogant developer? I won't even do the show of hands won't even do it Kurt standoffish They don't want to talk to you you're a waste you know you're you're taking their precious time They refuse to put stuff into terms that you'll understand they sort of have these little tests that they make you pass I mean do you know node? I mean do you know do you know it like as an accusation, right? They make you feel like an imposter right and they don't care whether you understand them or not because they know They're right and whether you can get with that or not who cares so a rock star, right? That's that's kind of arrogance personified and given a guitar, okay? Now where does arrogance come from well sometimes you know bad manners, but more often it's that people You know love clarity they love the view right and you who have no ability to understand that that view are just sort of bringing confusion into their whole thing Why would I try to explain this knowledge that it cost me a lot to acquire it to people who have no context for it Right, then the second attitude problem is called breezy-ness. What is breezy-ness? It's so easy to get up here. Actually, I'm just gonna assume that you're up here with me anyway now Let's talk about the view in extreme detail right breezy-ness You're trying to pretend that gaps of knowledge don't exist and and so you exceed other people's ability to learn You use way too much tacit knowledge Which is background knowledge that people need to understand what you're talking about that you assume they have that in fact They may not you know so you sail over other people's heads you skip the basics and you dive right into the to the Stuff that you want to talk about that you think is cool and you're constantly going this is so easy This is so simple. This is so logical right, but it's I mean it is to you right The the view is so cool. It's sitting right there and it's this awesome thing to you But remember only you can see it and it costs you a lot It took a lot of climbing to get there and you're kind of ignoring this fact and that's what I'm calling breezy-ness So the basic problem in both cases I believe is that you're blinded by the view. It's so cool It's beautiful right and and that and that focus on what you know As opposed to what other people need to learn is becoming an impediment to communication Your knowledge is so important to you that you can't properly communicate that knowledge to people who need elements of it Okay, so Those are what to avoid now. What can we do instead? Well, I think there's two things are really helpful to keep in mind if you want to communicate technical knowledge effectively The first thing is that your communication should be audience aware the second is that it should be strategic And we're gonna talk about both of these audience aware Communication means start where your audience is reason carefully and without bias about what is likely to be the extent of the technical knowledge of the people you're talking to and Then communicate in a way that reflects that understanding and actually respects where people are are at and doesn't wish they were You know somewhere else And here are a few strategies for this one is to use analogies, right? Analogies like the hilltop analogy that we're using it may phrase is your own understanding in terms of other people's understanding It's a sort of a form of translation and it can be so valuable in getting the key points of a piece of technical knowledge across Right. So how does WordPress work? Here are two examples one without an analogy and one with well WordPress stores post another date And it's my sequel database and users appear I can't I don't have time to finish all this But it means nothing to like a hundred percent of human beings, right? And then number two WordPress is like a factory that builds webpages The database is like the warehouse where the raw materials sit and then they come through a factory And that's what the PHP processing is and then you've got a theme and that's that's all the assembly lines that the raw materials go Down, you know, maybe there's a page assembly line and a single assembly line and an index assembly line And that's your theme and then sometimes we need stuff that the factory can't do by default and then we call on outside contractors And those are called plugins, you know, I mean in 20 seconds somebody has a decent idea of what WordPress is with none of the specifics Which is what you want Okay, another thing you can do to be audience aware is To actually list out the knowledge that what you're saying depends on you remember tasks at knowledge is basically how you communicate Breezy breezy with breezyness here being like a really bad thing, right? So how far up the hill are we starting and if we're not starting at the bottom at the valley where everybody is What can I the listener do to get up to the starting point? You know, you don't want to just start you don't want to just be like oh great now that you're a thousand feet Here's how you get to 1800 where the hilltop is right you want to say this is how you get from zero to a thousand So this again, I don't have time to read it But this is the like what hits you when you go to like the introduction for noobs page of grunt, right? And for me, it's like I I just bounce off this it's like runs not for me, right? How how about like an intro to using the command line for people who you know Who aren't where they need to beat it to use ground but would like to be right? Okay, so that's audience aware communication now strategic communication That means once again tie your communication back to the goal of it You know people need to know your knowledge not for no reason but for some reason and you want to actually reason about What is what what do people need to know and you want to tailor your communication to that? Right, so let's say a client is asking you what's WordPress the first thing is just the Wikipedia description of WordPress It's a free and open source blah blah blah, right? But the second thing is WordPress makes it really easy for you to use your website and guess what it also makes it quick and easy for us to build That website and if you'd like to know the specifics we'd be happy to explain it like I as a client It's like I want that I would love to pay for that and if I have questions I have a lot of confidence that you know that you can give me you know more But maybe this is all I need to know to be like great. You're hired, right? So this is strategic communication. It's sensitive to the reason that you're communicating in the first place And actually this can do a lot for your writing There's a couple examples that I'm going to go through very very quickly But like here's one basically a conditional tag is just a function that how about just a conditional tag is a function Right because our purpose is to explain something not to emphasize how easy the thing we're explaining is and so those those two words They're not strategic. So they're gone and I'll skip this one sort of a similar principle, but this is actually in the WordPress Like this is in WordPress success WordPress has been installed. Were you expecting more steps? Sorry to disappoint and How about success WordPress has been installed? Thank you and enjoy because again our purpose is what's our purpose? Is it to make people feel kind of snarky about how easy WordPress is? It's like that makes no sense like what if the person had a hard time installing WordPress like I did the first ten times, right? I mean, it's not very strategic. So that's that's my little plug for Overhauling the way that WordPress is sometimes written. Anyway Okay, so to sum up don't be arrogant meaning don't treat gaps in knowledge as Like as an insult something that's been done to you that you have a super bad attitude about because you're an awesome technical like That's arrogant. Don't do that and don't be breezy meaning don't pretend gaps in knowledge don't exist, right? Those are those are two no-nos and actually communicating to other human beings and Do be audience aware and strategic audience aware means what is the knowledge level of the people I'm talking to and how can I communicate in a way that respects that and Strategic means why are we having this conversation in the first place? What is this leading to and how can I tailor my communication to that? Okay, and then this is a final note just on empathy You can you can do all this pretty well and still not be very nice and when you're not nice you kind of put people on edge and People who are on edge tense people tend to have a hard time learning. So here here's how to have empathy in two very simple hacks Which is a I'm turning into a BuzzFeed article after this so look out for that but Okay, so when you're speaking smile as you talk and See see if anything changes if you just sort of physically smile as you talk And if you're writing put a little smiley face after every paragraph and delete or rework anything that sounds sarcastic and Boom empathy acquired Okay guys, so that's communicating technical knowledge And that's how to be on the hill and help the people in the valley either get up the hill or learn You know the elements of the view that they need to live their happy lives in the valley. Thank you so much