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The DSB method—Persuasive writing made simpler

University of Denver

Corresponding author: kmahrer@du.edu

The first 20% of the full text of this article appears below.

As I have discussed in previous columns, successful technical documents possess critical qualities. One of these and the one most commonly missing in weak documents is persuasiveness. Simply, persuasiveness is demonstrated value or utility to the reader. Weak writers assume value if they highlight the hoops through which they jumped in completing their work. This is not the case. Effort is not value; value is value, and it has to be shown.

It's easy to misconstrue persuasion or selling the value with a vision of a scientist or engineer as a stereotypical used-car salesperson with a gaudy sports coat and a slap on the back. That is not the case. By selling or persuading, I mean overtly and unquestionably demonstrating value, utility, and benefits and not placing the burden of finding value on the reader. Most readers won't go looking for value, and the document will fall into the abyss of the eminently forgettable. No authors want that.

So we agree that persuasion is an important quality. Then, why is it so often overlooked or ignored and how can writers increase the persuasiveness of their documents? The answer to the first question comes from the traditional structure of technical writing. This structure is IMRaD, an acronym for Introduction, Means/Methods, Results, and Discussion.

IMRaD is pervasive. It's pervasive because it's easy; it's easy because it simply follows the work chronology. As discussed below, that's also its weakness. Before we discuss that weakness, let's analyze the parallel between IMRaD and work chronology.

The first thing the researcher does or has done is background reading. The first element of IMRaD, the Introduction, is typically a boatload of summaries of papers, books, reports, abstracts, theses, etc. Some authors attempt to focus the summaries on their work. More often the . . . [Full Text of this Article]