The other day, I managed finally to watch Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino with some friends of mine. One of the scenes reminded me of issues faced when writing documentation: What do you leave out?

To set the scene, Clint’s Eastwoord’s character, Walt Kowalski, is a gruff Korean War veteran and retired Ford autoworker still living in his older neighbourhood that is quickly being repopulated with Hmong immigrants and gangs. After a failed burglary and gang initiation, Walt’s teenaged next-door neighbour (Thao) comes to apologize, and to work for Walt as both punishment and compensation.

Walt is a very self-sufficient man, keeping his property and belongings well maintained, and generally sitting on his veranda drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon. As such, he has no work for Thao—until he surveys his neighbourhood a little more and sees the disrepair into which many of the houses have fallen. He gets Thao to repair the roof and eavestroughing of the house across the street.

At this point, one of my friends, an intelligent, well-educated nursing manager and operating room nurse, asked, “Why that house? Why is that house important?” And it wasn’t so much that the house was important, but the audience is expected to realize that Walt has become tired of sitting on his porch staring at his old neighbour’s house falling down across from him.

But could Eastwood (as the director) not have included a short scene where Walt and the new neighbour across the street have words about the state of the house? Or where Walt makes a specific comment about having to stare at that particular house as it falls down? Would it really have made a difference to the story, or most people’s understanding?

We make decisions like this every day. Whether it’s to include a word in a glossary or index, add an introduction or conclusion to a procedure, include a screenshot or even to write for a particular audience. There’s always a choice to be made that will either add to the understanding of a document or take away from it. These are especially important decisions when factoring in budget and time constraints:

• Do we have time to change the glossary or index?
• Can we afford to print more pages?
• Do we have time to write more introductions and conclusions, and get them reviewed?
• Is there time to get and properly edit the screenshot?
• Can we rewrite for a novice audience or do we continue writing for the expert audience?

While I’m certain we’d all love to write the perfect document every time, in the end, the original planning and analysis should have accounted for all of these issues. Something may have been missed, but it must become part of the post-project review, something to consider for the next time.

Movie-makers don’t get a second chance to make a movie, but much of our documentation can be revised later and having a solid review to work from is an excellent starting point.

How do you make sure you get all the right information into your documents?

Image courtesy Ian Britton | FreeFoto.com