Assumptions, the audience and arithmetic?

["Hart, Geoff" <Geoff-H -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA>]

John Fleming reports: <<At one point in the procedure is a series of steps
where the person... subtracts one number from another.  The number
subtracted is often negative (meaning, in layman's terms, change the sign
and add). When we hit this spot, my SME went into some pretty convoluted and
arcane descriptions of this process.  Points about remembering when to
change the sign and add and so forth.  Scary thing is, she had a yellow
sticky to remind her of some of these more arcane gyrations.>>

This person sure sounds like an expert--with few exceptions (e.g., Steven
Gould, David Suzuki) experts tend to understand the nitty-gritty details so
well that they can't explain their subject simply to any non-expert. That's
why God invented technical writers. "Note: If you're subtracting a negative
number, change the sign and add" is about as complicated as you need to get
outside of a course in introductory mathematics; _there_, the "convoluted
and arcane descriptions" might well be appropriate. Provide an example or
two that illustrate how this works and you've provided a concise, effective
explanation for anyone who needs it.

<<Now, the intended audience is generally clerical/accounting staff. That
is, while they are capable of doing a lot of accounting functions, they are
by no means professional accountants or people with BCOM degrees.>>

That lack of professional accreditation should make no difference. If they
already routinely subtract negative numbers, and the software emulates the
same processes they would already do without the software, then they already
know what to do. If that's not the case, then the simple explanation (above)
will tell them everything they need to know. But I have to ask an awkward
question: why isn't the software doing this calculation for the user? It
seems a bit odd to me that someone is doing "back of the envelope"
calculations when the software can do them faster and with far less risk of
error.

<<Can I safely assume that my audience can understand the procedure if
explained in the basic mathematical terms.>>

Not a safe assumption. As writers, we complain about low literacy levels,
but innumeracy is commonly stated to be an even more serious problem. (I
have no actual statistics other than personal experience to support this
assertion. It certainly fits my experience-based prejudices.) The people who
already know how to solve such problems will simply go ahead and do so
without coaching; the ones who don't or who aren't confident in their
ability will need some kind of support (such as the example) to help them
accomplish the task.

--Geoff Hart, FERIC, Pointe-Claire, Quebec
geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
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