Abstract

As questions of public policy become more involved with the uses of scientific and technological knowledge, the public must increasingly rely upon interpreters of that knowledge to be able to form and express valid opinions. Here is a new and important role for the technical writer. The President's Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island stated that the most serious effect of that accident was severe mental stress. The stress was caused by incompetent reporting by people who lacked the necessary scientific and technological knowledge, or by people who possessed that knowledge but who were unable to express it in terms that lay people could understand.