Abstract
Frank Pietrucha’sSupercommunicatorinaugurates the title term as an indispensable characteristic of contemporary professional, technical, and business communicators. After working as a communications professional for 25 years, Pietrucha has witnessed the ways that poor communication can undermine knowledge sharing and innovation. To stave off costly future blunders, he shares the fruits of his experience in a single well-organized volume. The book’s target audience is communicators, broadly defined as anyone with ideas or information to share, both in the academy and in industry, who struggle to tell others about increasingly complicated technological developments. This book works as a how-to guide for technical specialists with large stakes in communicating technical content to nontechnical audiences and also offers a “big-picture” perspective of the field of business and technical communication.
The principles of effective communication outlined in this book are grounded in Pietrucha’s broader vision of how digital communication is fundamentally changing the ways that information is created, distributed, and consumed. To this end, he offers real-world examples to illustrate his points, ranging from his own frustrations at not understanding the significance of physicists’ official reports of the Higgs boson particle, to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’s decision to outlaw PowerPoint presentations in favor of narratives to circulate new ideas within the company.Supercommunicatorbecomes increasingly helpful as the reader approaches the text with an awareness of what deficiencies in communication he or she wishes to remedy.
The book is divided into 9 parts and 31 chapters, but it is not a tome. Each part covers a broad topic in effective communication, such as audience, subject, and simplicity, with individual chapters offering more focused instruction on topics including when and how often a communicator should use technical jargon. Each section contains anywhere from 2 to 6 individual chapters, with most offering specific examples illustrating instances of when the points made were handled successfully and poorly.
The structure of the book provides broad principles with illustrative case study examples that make this text easily accessible for undergraduate students in any field and industry professionals alike. For example, in Chapter 15, Pietrucha discusses how his time at NASA made him aware that acronyms can hinder communication because time and energy is spent on remembering and translating the acronym at the expense of the content being communicated between parties. Conversely, Chapter 18, titled “It’s Story Time!” provides the example of how Daniel Yergen and Joseph Stanislaw made economics accessible to readers in their bookThe Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economyby employing a narrative, storytelling structure to the technical economic content.
Because Pietrucha is fully committed to the multimedia revolution, this book does a great job of discussing how fundamental communication skills such as awareness of audience and subject matter are deployed in this new digital age. For example, Chapter 21, “What Not to Do When Speaking Human,” discusses how digital media contributed to the shift in register in technical communication from the formalities associated with letter writing to a more relaxed first person tone. Pietrucha argues that the proliferation of digital content such as ebooks, earticles and other multimedia creations are more appealing to the busy executive than overly formal 30-page white papers. He identifies a shift from print thinking to digital expression and how that changes the way communicators deliver meaning. The book’s biggest accomplishment is painting a picture of how the adjustment to digital communications should not be an unguided accumulation of content but should rather place information in the right context so the audience can better understand its meaning. Pietrucha is arguing for not just more, but deeper thinking about ways to use digital communication effectively.
Pietrucha certainly practices what he preaches inSupercommunicator.In Part V, he outlines his “Guidelines to Effective Communication,” where he includes a directive to use shorter sentences, shorter paragraphs, and shorter chapters, which is exactly how this book reads. Some chapters are barely three pages long. While this can, at times, make the book seem repetitive, it increases the accessibility for the student or professional who may not be inclined to wade through a larger technical communications textbook or who has reached the point of diminishing returns on their Google searches.
Part IX, “Visual and Interactive,” neatly rounds out the book with a forward-looking discussion of the value of multimedia design. Pietrucha leaves his reader with a synthesis of who and what a supercommunicator is and offers theWashington Postunder Jeff Bezos’s ownership as a sterling example. After the struggling newspaper’s sale to Bezos in October 2013, it gained market share by embracing visual and digital content: “TheWashington Post’seffort to help its readers visualize and experience the data in a new manner gives us a glimpse into our future as communicators. We can expect the role of graphics and applications to continue to expand in all of our communication efforts” (p. 229).
Supercommunicator’s 9 parts and 31 chapters might prove to be intimidating for the neophyte technical communicator looking for guidance. But this structure can also be a selling point for the potential international business student or a journalist covering a complicated story. The book contains a simple and practical perspective of technical communication in a digital age, and it can function as a supplementary or primary text for any teachers of undergraduate professional, technical, and business writing. Pietrucha wants the reader to use this book as a guide to understanding fundamental principles of technical communication, or simply as a handbook for quick reference while working on a project, or both.