My brother E is warm-hearted and empathetic--good qualities for the IT support specialist that he is. He often teaches me new things about my field of technical communication, though I don't think he knows that.

For example:

Just as Dad has been trying to put the final refinements on his memoir of his years as a WWII fighter pilot, his copy of Word had begun to act more and more strangely. First, it would simply die from time to time. Later, it refused to show some of its menus, and instead took to displaying cryptic error messages accusing Dad of things he was pretty sure he had not done. I checked to see what I could do. I can often fix Mom and Dad's minor computer problems, but I had no clue. The Big Gun was needed for this baffling problem. E arrived, took one look, and fixed the problem in about 30 seconds, max, as Dad and I watched. E knew what I had forgotten: Dad uses System 9 on his iMac. To fix his problem, you simply need to delete the corrupted settings file for the offending program.

Dad was curious about this instant fix to a problem that had been pestering him for weeks, so E explained about settings files: "Say you wanted to change the defaults for your program--maybe you wanted to use a 14-point font instead of the default 12-point. So you'd change the default font size. If something goes wrong with the settings file, you delete it from your system, and the problem is fixed, but the default program settings are restored."

This explanation was nearly meaningless to Dad. So E explained a different way: "Say that on your P-40, the guns were toed in a certain amount according to the factory specs. But you wanted to change that, so you adjusted the settings to toe the guns in a little differently..."

This explanation connected with Dad. What I especially like about it are two things: First, E used language and concepts familiar to his audience--something technical communicators are taught to do, but he gets extra points for so creatively transferring concepts between domains. Second, E's choice of explanation was respectful of Dad's expertise and knowledge. It put attention on Dad's knowledge rather than the technical details of his computer. It's so easy for someone who has wonderful expertise in other domains to feel like a dumb novice when faced with a disobedient computer. E gracefully prevented that from happening.