Aviation has been on my mind a lot lately. Not only is my partner a professional pilot, but he’s also in the final stages of building an airplane.
In honor of National Aviation Day last Monday, I hoped to share a story on how deeply intertwined technical writing is with the aviation industry. Many advances in how we plan, organize, format and write technical content have been shaped by aviation. Although I couldn’t find a comprehensive summary, the STOP technique comes to mind as particularly influential.
STOP, short for Sequential Thematic Organization of Publications, was developed in the 1960s by Hughes-Fullerton, a division of Hughes Aircraft Company, as a modular approach to writing proposals. Often compared to a storyboard, the STOP technique not only allowed for writers to collaborate more efficiently, but it added consistency to the order and structure of documents to make them more reader-friendly. Many of these techniques have been adopted and refined by the tech comm community and are now considered best practices.