Technology Translator

By Tiffany Yang

As an Information Systems major, learning about prose writing styles has intrigued me to analyze how technology is written and communicated to the general public. Technology is a niche field of knowledge, mainly obtained only by educated and trained professionals. Having grown up without advanced technology and before having pursued this field, I always found technology instructions were rather difficult to understand and follow. Therefore, I found an article that provides an explanation of how to connect a router to a modem, in plain style. This is the article I have chosen to analyze, to determine how well the writers have converted something that is commonly complex, to an easy and non-obscuring plain style.

Before we begin, we must understand the context of this article, called “How to Connect a Router to a Modem – Create a Wi-Fi network and connect to the web.” It was published on a website called Lifewire. In their description, they state that their mission is to:

...help people get the most out of the technology that dominates all of our lives today. We provide context for the latest technology news, an extensive library of updated educational how-to articles, and independent product advice and reviews to more than 15 million users each month. Our goal is to help consumers understand what is happening in the world of tech, figure out what products enhance their lives, and learn how to make it all work. We aim to be the trustworthy, friendly, and authoritative voice for people who use their tech every single day and expect it to work. When it doesn't, they want to search for an answer, get it working, and get on with their day.

Based on this description, we can confirm that their target audience is open to the general public. They aim to help people who have access to internet and need help finding quick, easy and understandable answers to solve their technology problems. This article was also one of the first five links that appeared after googling, “How to install a router,” meaning it’s extremely accessible and there are little to no restrictions to inclusivity. This article was also written by Robert Earl Wells, a writer from Portland, Oregon. He graduated from the University of North Carolina, and his areas of expertise include smart home, gaming, steaming entertainment, Android and iOS, software and apps, consumer technology and social media. He has over 15 years of experience writing, editing, and being a technology enthusiast. Lifewire has fact checkers to ensure solutions, facts and technical information in their news articles are accurate and comprehensive and statistics are properly sourced and up to date.

Now that we have covered the background and contextual factors, let us now discuss the contents of the article. To simplify my analysis, I have selected a portion of the article to examine:

To log into your router and change the network settings, open a web browser, enter your router's IP address in the URL bar, then enter the user name and password. Once logged into your router's admin interface, you can set up a guest network, configure security settings, and more. At a minimum, you should change the default Wi-Fi password to decrease the likelihood of hackers infiltrating your network. If you or another person changed the default user name and password, reset your router to factory settings. Insert the straightened end of a paperclip into the hole on the router's back and hold down the reset button inside for 10 seconds.

The first step in my analysis was to put this into a readability calculator, which provides the statistics involving Gunning Fog index (the indication of the number of years of formal education that a person requires in order to easily understand the text on the first reading), and the Flesch Reading Ease (the number representing readability). For this portion of the article, it scored a Gunning Fog index of 12.12, meaning that someone would require about 12 years of education to understand these instructions, which is relatively high. One of the determining factors of plain style is a low Gunning Fog index. It also scored a Flesch Reading Ease of 47.11, which is relatively low, when plain style should have high numbers of reading eases. These high scores argue the instructions provided by Lifewire are not as simple and easily comprehensive as they would hope, and it has readability statistics an official style piece would have.

Next let’s look at the strategies identified. The obvious strategy that is usually the main cause for obscurity in technology is the use of special terminology, also known as jargon. Technology has specific terms which offer no plausible substitutes. For example, in the text, the terms network, IP address, admin interface, and URL are possible causes of obscurity. The article uses these terms assuming readers have basic knowledge and understanding of technology. Another official style strategy used was the incorporation of multiple ideas in a singular sentence. Let’s look at this sentence for example, “Once logged into your router's admin interface, you can set up a guest network, configure security settings, and more.” This sentence mentions multiple areas of technology that could have been split up and described in more detail to provide a better understanding to readers. What are they? Why do they need to be set up? What else more? This sentence will cause uncertainty, leaving readers with unresolved issues. The use of jargon confirms that this uses official style strategies.

Although it has official style indicators, this article also has many plain style strategies. The first one being the low level of formality. This article is written in second person, creating a less formal tone for the article. The second strategy is the use of active voice, which is when the sentence or statement present the subject and following is the action of doing or verb, as opposed to passive voice which is the opposite in which the verb is presented first, followed by the subject. For example, the sentence “At a minimum, you should change the default Wi-Fi password to decrease the likelihood of hackers infiltrating your network” is active, but if it were to be written in official style passive voice, it would be revised as: “To decrease the likelihood of hackers infiltrating your network, you change the default Wi-Fi password.”

In conclusion, after taking into consideration the context of this article, the purpose, the audience, and the strategies, I believe this article did its best to translate complex technical instructions into something much simpler and more comprehensible, but because the terminology used don’t have simpler alternative choices, it is hard to replace the terminology with something more straightforward and transparent. The terminology in this particular article is needed, therefore cannot be avoided or replaced. What this article could have done better is split up multiple ideas, provide details and basic background knowledge of each idea or topic, instead of assuming all readers have an understanding. Despite this main flaw, the article does embody traits of plain style and to someone who does have basic knowledge of technology, these instructions would be easy to follow.