Readable AND Raidable

When I was younger, I won a competitive internship at one of our National Labs. At the time I was studying Earth Systems Science. I was assigned to the Underground Storage Technology department and given a mentor while I was there. I met a lot of interesting people. One of my favorite people I met there was not initially my mentor, but stepped into that role later. This is where I learned about ‘readable and raidable.’

This particular mentor had numerous engineering degrees, and professional engineering licenses. I asked him, why he didn’t get his PhD? The jist of his response I will never forget. He essentially said,

If I get a PhD in anything, I will forever be put in that single bucket and be unable to do anything else I find interesting.

At the time he said it, he was sitting next to a Nuclear Physicist with a PhD who confirmed it. :)

During the course of my internship, I needed to write a paper and present it. When I was first done writing this paper my mentor reviewed it. He then brought me to his office and he said,

You should be a lawyer. Your writing is very extensive and thorough. It is very readable and tells the story of your time here. That said, it is not at all, raidable. The people that will be reviewing your work do not generally have the luxury of time to read entire documents. They need to be able to ‘raid’ them for the information they need and move on with their own projects. Your papers and documents need to be both readable and raidable. Raidable means that I can look at a detailed outline that holds the ideas of whats in this paper. I can turn directly to a section, and within that section, which is broken out by subsection, I can turn to exactly the area that I suspect has the information I am interested in. I can get that information and move back to my own work using it as appropriate.

Over the years I have never forgotten this advice. I also share it with anyone that I see writing lawyerly, or writing stories that require cover to cover reading. Its not efficient in my work to do so. That is the stuff of novels.

This recommendation applies to all documents in my opinion. Powerpoints can benefit. Word docs can benefit. Many modern tools we use these days actually enable document raiding with search functionality.

Readable and Raidable rule the day. Be kind to your future self and others and make your documents both readable and raidable.