Simplified Technical English: what it is and why it exists
Some time back, my colleague Andrew Eather wrote a Red Pony Express article about contronyms: a word that can have completely opposite meanings. The English language is endlessly plastic, but this can be a problem when lives depend on precision.
Simplified Technical English (STE) is an international specification for the preparation of technical documentation in a controlled language. Its purpose is to limit (hence, ‘simplified’) the words that can be employed by the technical author so that every term has one, and only one, specific meaning. Authors of STE use the writing rules and dictionary that form the specification to produce their content. STE was first created to produce civil aircraft maintenance documentation, but it’s now used to write procedures for a wide range of industries.
A presenter at the 2021 Australian Society for Technical Communication conference gave a great example of the importance of STE. He cited the instance of a plane approaching an airport in the US for an emergency landing. Instructions were given to ‘clear the runway’. Thinking they had been asked to perform their standard task, the snowplough operator headed out onto the tarmac to clear it of snow, only narrowly avoiding a collision with the incoming aircraft.
The writing rules and the dictionary that form the STE specification are intended to avoid any such ambiguity. The rules cover aspects of grammar and style. The dictionary specifies the words that can be used and in what specific context, along with words that cannot be used.
Writing procedural documents in STE is a skill, requiring an advanced understanding of English grammar. The ASD-STE100 Specification is controlled by the Aerospace, Security and Defence Industries Association of Europe (ASD) and can be downloaded from the ASD website free of charge. However, the ASD recommends any technical author wishing to apply STE correctly first undertakes training from an experienced STE user.
The applications for STE are obviously highly technical. It would not be much help for writing a novel. It does however have an important application in maintaining industrial safety – a fact you might want to reflect on the next time you board a plane.
