Overview

As hectic as your school schedule may be, the workplace frequently places even greater demands on your time. When you're so busy you don't want to be bothered by frivolous details, you can be sure your coworkers feel the same. So you may one day find yourself spending weeks preparing a report, only to have your boss flip to the final page and ask, "What's the bottom line?"

Make no mistake—good decisions require careful research, planning, and analysis. Writing a lengthy report is proof that you've gone through the necessary steps in proper fashion. But when information is conveyed, users frequently want only "the bottom line"—the key concept, argument, idea, conclusion, or recommendation. If they like the idea, they'll want to read a bit more. And that's when you'll need to present them with a summary or abstract.

Enter the age of the sound bite, the PowerPoint heading, and three bullets. Boil it down, squeeze it down, deliver information in a hierarchy based on 'need to know.' We all suffer from information glut, not just the executives who demand the executive summary. We just don't have time to read everything. But with this essential summarizing step, must we sacrifice depth and complexity?

Technology won't let us. Biotechnology and nanotechnology have increased the complexity of the world exponentially. Technical writers and the technicians and engineers themselves are going to have to translate it for those of us who are not specialists. But what if they don't do it? What if all the summaries and abstracts suggest, 'And then a miracle happens...' What happens then?

What happens is a power divide. The technological priesthood holds the keys of insider cultures of power just as doctors once acted as gods in white coats and didn't tell their patients anything about their own bodies. The rest of us are kept as children in the dark—pay no attention to that man behind the curtain, the Great and Powerful Oz. Is that a world we want?

Two great writers have said no. One, Stephen J. Gould, died in 2002. The other, Stephen Hawking, lives in a wheelchair with Lou Gehrig's disease. These writers made difficult scientific concepts available to ordinary people, and they didn't do it in a heading and three bullets, saying 'And then there was a miracle, don't worry your little head over it.' They translated the message clearly, concisely, and effectively, so their intended audiences— #151;&uscan actually understand. That's your job, too.