Pitching the right tone in transaction-oriented writing

à la carte transactions

Anne Lehrndorfer

Procedures and descriptions of actions determine our life. Our sense of procedures and transactions develops from the infant stages, right through adulthood, depending on skill levels and strategies. Exceptional situations such as stress, fatigue or boredom have a negative impact on our understanding of an action, because basic drives come into conflict under these circumstances, and make it very difficult to predict acceptable levels of complexity in descriptions of transactions. This is quite a challenge for technical documentation. The following linguistic and didactic tools help in reducing unnecessary burdening of this “action-memory”.