About No Brainer Day

DESCRIPTION:

National No Brainer Day is an unofficial event in the United States, and in LEEP’s opinion, should be a salute to technical writers and their profession.

Perhaps the best way to celebrate it is to look at how you communicate with others when teaching a concept.

Is there a way to simplify the instructions?

Can you make it a ‘no brainer’.

It is far more difficult to write simply than detailed. Any professional advertising copywriter will tell you that. Hats off to the professional technical writers out there who make instructions a no brainer for us all…when we read them!

December 1959 is the first time the common saying “no brainer” was used. It was included in a cartoon, published in the Long Beach Independent to describe the amount of effort it took to learn the game of Gin. Today it has come to mean something is very easy and you don’t need a brain to figure it out. On the opposite end, it can also mean really stupid.

Personal note from Laura:

Crafting instructions into a ‘no brainer’, (also known as technical writing at a 3rd grade level), isn’t as easy as it sounds. Not to say that a third grader doesn’t have a brain. In technical writing, that’s the benchmark of education attainment professionals strive to hit in order to make instructions understandable to the largest segment of the population.

Technical writing, which I took at university, is the only writing course I have ever received a poor grade in, (I think I got a D). Technical writing is not a no brainer. No matter how hard I tried, I could not write below a 6th grade level!

Personally, that’s what I believe No Brainer Day should be about, a salute to Technical Writing Professionals.

Since there is no other purpose to it, that is how we’re categorizing it.