About No Brainer Day

DESCRIPTION:

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

The best way to celebrate it is to look at how you communicate with others when teaching a concept. Can the instructions be simplified? Can you make it a "no-brainer?"

It is far more challenging to write simply than detailed. Any professional advertising copywriter will tell you that. Hats off to the professional technical writers who make instructions a no-brainer for us all.

December 1959 was the first time the common saying "no-brainer" was used in a cartoon published in the Long Beach Independent to describe the 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 foolishness.

A personal note from Laura:

Crafting instructions (technical writing) into a no-brainer is more challenging than 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 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. Technical writing is supposed to be simplistic, and no matter how hard I tried, I could not write below a sixth-grade level!

That's what No Brainer Day should be about, a salute to Technical Writing Professionals, and since there is no other purpose to it, that is how we're categorizing it.