It will never cease to amaze me that standards bodies whose sole purpose is to help everyone coordinate by creating and distributing a standardizing document that everyone involved should read and conform to are so reluctant to share the document. Here, they offer to email it to you if you ask nicely in the form of emailing an Excel file, and that's unusually permissive. Surely some of these standards bodies should be interested in proactively telling people what their standards are.
Actual spec, for those who don't feel like emailing an Excel file to get their free copy: <a href="https://technicalwritingexpert.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/ASD-STE100-ISSUE-8.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://technicalwritingexpert.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/1...</a>
WOW! They really streamlined their operation. Last time I looked at their site you had to send an e-mail to a certain address, with the subject line "REQUEST COPY" (had to be exact) and the body containing your phone number. You'd then get an SMS with the URL of a WEBP image of a QR code, which resolved to a Gemini address of a document (formatted in the HP Printer Command Language (PCL)) describing detailed instructions on how to construct an Excel spreadsheet in the correct format to form a request to get the Simplified Technical English document, along with the address where to send it.<p>Now it looks like they just give you the Excel spreadsheet. What a good idea! And you might not even have to print it any more.<p>I hope they are putting all the saved time to a good cause.
I used to write technical manuals for aircraft and this really takes me back. At one point in time there was an endless debate about whether or not the company I was working for would adopt STE100, S1000D, or both. At the time software support for both standards was poor. I haven't kept up on software for this niche since then so I can't say if it is any better.<p>From my perspective STE100 is intended for things like the aviation industry, where everything is in English, but non-native English speakers are involved in critical process like repairing and flying aircraft. I'm not sure it is really necessary anywhere else, but the fundamental concepts are reasonable. Keep your sentences short, avoid ambiguous terminology, and keep your vocabulary minimal.
I'd have a really hard time with this, saying "Run the program" is forbidden language. You'd need to say "OPERATE THE SOFTWARE".
It's interesting to me how doing this for technical documentation feels like a smart idea and makes me happy, but doing this for non-technical communication immediately sets off every 1984-style dystopia alarm in my brain.
Sounds interesting, but the website is lacking. I'd've liked to see real-life examples of texts rewritten using STE, as well as comparisons to other widely-used style guides. And just give me a fcking download link.
I move in these military/defense spec circles rather a lot, and yeah, ASD has come light years when it comes to ASD-100 (STE) availability. Cruise this thread and you'll see quite a few of the horror stories users have had just getting their hands on a printed copy of the specification. Why, you might ask, why in the dickens was this arrangement so resilient? Whelp, it goes back to the governance of these specs, and the ugly truth is that if the national military sits out the technical steering, and then the big OEMs sit out the technical steering, the only ones left are the <i>existing software vendors</i>. So that probably tells you all you need to know about how that goes.<p>I'd also like to give a shout out to TechScribe.uk, who sells a LanguageTool package to use STE as a LanguageTool grammar and language set. RedPen.CC also has some STE rules you can plug into the linter. RedPen and LanguageTool, you can integrate those with Visual Studio Code or another standard text editor. Of course, if you're tasked with STE, then you probably also have the budget to go to the Big Boys, Etteplan (formerly Tedopres) and those fellas, who are in the spec governance up to their elbows. There's a reason licenses for aerospace techpubs can easily clear 50k per seat per year - and the reason is crap like that.
I like the idea and want a software tool that helps me write STE as a hobbyist. It's not the first time I've found friction with ESL folks with some of my vocabulary.<p>Looks like there are some here <a href="https://www.techscribe.co.uk/techw/asd-simplified-technical-english.htm#language-checkers" rel="nofollow">https://www.techscribe.co.uk/techw/asd-simplified-technical-...</a>
I can’t emphasize enough how important a technical English standard is. I’ve been reading these manuals for a high end industrial document and it looks like it was written by a ten year old. No conceptual information, no continuity, and various street talk style instructive sentences.
Reads very nicely but I can't imagine someone checking the dictionary for every verb or noun they use in order to determine whether it is approved.
I like the idea of these. As a native English speaker I'd be more comfortable with a sort of code/dialect switch when talking to ESL speakers, rather than worrying about them when I talk normally.<p>Like let me keep my language the way I want to speak it, and let me use this with a broader audience for the purpose of global communication.