Teach me a story

A friend of mine linked me a semi-technical blogpost about a parsing technique (completely unrelated to my last post). Its basically a cute little fiction story told in first person in a heavily anime-trope-influenced universe, as a frame for an introductory discussion on PADS.

Certainly its a bit more fluff than substance in this example, but I always liked the idea of softening instruction with a little creative writing, particularly for new users or small children, where the reader is coming into a very alien environment.

I think what appeals to me about this teaching technique is it gets the reader accustomed to learning how things work, rather than just trying to demonstrate how to get a particular behavior out of them.

To back up for a moment, consider this synopsis of Star Wars: "There's an Empire and a Rebellion and they try to kill each other." Granted its short, but even forgiving that for a moment, you can give a much more interesting description of Star Wars in the same space. While factual, it omits everything we find interesting in story; from the characters and their feelings to the people, customs, and politics of that "galaxy far far away." You might not realize how much you really absorb from the scenery in a fictional work. Sure Star Wars nerds can tell you what company manufactured the Imperial star destroyers (Kuat Drive Yards, but I only know by proxy I swear), but just about anyone who's seen The Empire Strikes Back knows that the Jawas were a nomadic tribe of traders on Tatooine (even if to you its "those little druid guys" and "that desert place.") Heck, even if you slept through most of it you probably know that sand people always travel single file to hide their numbers.

Now lets pair that off with "when the computer is slow and that light on the side blinks you need to close some programs." We're talking about something technical now, its a different mode of writing. But is it still deficient for the same reason as our Star Wars tag line? Well, consider that opening text that scrolls by in Star Wars as a substitute for our one-line description. Now consider the equivalent for our technical statement: "Programs on your computer store themselves and their important information in RAM while they're running, and when you run out of RAM some of that information is moved to your hard drive. It takes a long time to move things to your hard drive and a long time to read things on your hard drive compared to doing the same in RAM, so if this happens a lot it can make your computer slower. Closing some programs will usually help." I made that about as friendly and gentle as I could. My mother would still be hopeless with it, and she can generally follow most feature films.

In technical writing, when the audience is an extremely non-technical case of "user," any sort of "backstory" on how the thing you are describing works is met very quickly with "whatever, get to the point." Fiction is different. Motivation is imperative for character development, and a believable universe is necessary to make the story relatable, and while any element of fiction can be used to bludgeon the audience to death, they're willing, at least passively, to learn about the larger mechanics of the world where the story takes place.

My theory is that by practising technical and creative writing in close proximity, you can disarm the user into learning how things work. If the inner whirring of cogs in the user's operating system is fundamental to the hero getting the girl, maybe the user will swallow it easier. The goal is to get them to stop looking at the computer as something that is in the way any time they are consciously aware of it. You don't have to think about the mechanics of leverage and cutting paper to use a pair of scissors, but a computer is a general purpose device, and applying it to a new purpose requires understanding its nature. Enjoying a story is similar in this way; if the story doesn't seem to take place in a universe that continues after the story is over, with characters that live their lives when we're not watching them, its not interesting.

Now its 2am and I need a cheeseburger and sleep. As a closing question, are we using this sort of technique anywhere in Fedora's documentation? Are any other projects out there doing this sort of thing? Should you be?