TMI Tirade ? Technical Writing Tips for the Oil Patch

When writing big reports, you just don?t need to include every single piece of data you have. There is such a thing as Too Much Information = TMI.

For example, when writing a field development plan, the readers want to know what the plans are to develop the field. You may have done a year?s worth of geological study, with core descriptions, sedimentological reconstructions, and examinations of the fossils and burrows left behind by prehistoric itty-bitty critters with Latin names (in italics).

But you simply do not have to include all 109 pages of geology in the field development plan!

For one thing, nobody is going to have time to read 109 pages of geology. Not even fellow geologists.

And for another thing, there are no plans for the field geology. Trust me, the geology is not going to change during the next 25 years of the field life, and even if it did, it would be totally unplanned. Mother Nature is going to do what Mother Nature is going to do, and it won?t change the current plans for the field in any way, shape or form.

So why do you have to put 109 pages of geology in the main document? Surely a 10-page summary describing the sort of rock one might encounter at the different depths will suffice, putting the other 99 pages as a separate appendix document.

Already, Microsoft Word is balking, choking on the 124 megabytes of pictures, sending me ?not enough memory? error messages ? and I haven?t even gotten into the number of wells they plan to drill and whatever facilities and money they will need to flange up those plans.

I think I?m going to have to do some serious chopping if I?m going to be able to fit the actual field development plans into a document that?s of a manageable size.
It?s already way too fat to fly.

Hilarious Typo of the Day:
Instead of ?steam generator? they had ?seam generator.?
We used to call that a sewing machine, back in the day in Home Ec. class.

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Profound Quote of the Day:

?The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.?
- Hans Hofmann, German artist, 1880-1966

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This entry was posted on February 14, 2013 at 4:49 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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