Wikipedia on why glue matters (or: how to do tech writing the right way)

Over the years, I’ve become a connoisseur of good technical writing. When you find it, you know it at once, and it’s a joy to read.

 The other day, I found some great technical writing on Wikipedia, and it was concerned with – of all things – glue. That’s right, the sticky stuff you use to… well… stick stuff to other stuff.

The Wikipedia folks did a much better job describing it than I just did. Let’s take a minute to dissect what they achieved in the three-paragraph “executive summary” of their article on adhesives. We’ll start with Paragraph #1, which is just one sentence long:

Adhesive, also known as glue, cement, mucilage, or paste, is any non-metallic substance applied to one or both surfaces of two separate items that binds them together and resists their separation.

So, right off the bat, there’s our definition. Pretty clear: glue sticks things together and keeps them together. It’s also not a metal, which means that things like nails and tacks don’t also somehow count as “glue”.

Paragraph #2:

The use of adhesives offers many advantages over binding techniques such as sewing, mechanical fastening, thermal bonding, etc. These include the ability to bind different materials together, to distribute stress more efficiently across the joint, the cost effectiveness of an easily mechanized process, an improvement in aesthetic design, and increased design flexibility. Disadvantages of adhesive use include decreased stability at high temperatures, relative weakness in bonding large objects with a small bonding surface area, and greater difficulty in separating objects during testing. [Emphases mine.]

It keeps going, but these first three sentences are really the heart of what I love about this executive summary. And why?

Because they’re telling you – in clear, fairly simple language – why you should care about glue.

So much technical documentation never addresses this point! The author is so in love with their subject, that they forget their reader may be coming at it utterly cold, or – even worse – skeptical that they should be learning about it in the first place. Any documentation should start by convincing the reader that this technology is worth their time. Then, and only then, can we get into such finer topics as natural glues versus synthetic ones.

Thus, the first sentence of Paragraph #2 acknowledges that glue has some competition when it comes to sticking things together. Why use sticky goop, when you could use thread (sewing), or nails (mechanical fastening), or melted metal via welding or soldering (thermal bonding)?

But, all this competition notwithstanding, the first sentence claims that glue is special in its own way.

How so?

Well, the second sentence gives us five pretty good reasons, which I won’t repeat here (though I’ll say my favorite is that it’s easier to automate gluing on an assembly line than sewing or welding).

But we’re not just hype men for glue here! To round out our picture of this technology, the third sentence acknowledges that glue is not perfect. For instance, heat makes glue dry out and break apart, so SpaceX should probably not try gluing their rockets together if they want them to survive re-entry.

The final paragraph, #3 out of 3, gives some nice historical context to this technology:

Adhesives may be found naturally or produced synthetically. The earliest human use of adhesive-like substances was approximately 200,000 years ago, when Neanderthals produced tar from the dry distillation of birch bark for use in binding stone tools to wooden handles. The first references to adhesives in literature appeared in approximately 2000 BC. The Greeks and Romans made great contributions to the development of adhesives. In Europe, glue was not widely used until the period AD 1500–1700. From then until the 1900s increases in adhesive use and discovery were relatively gradual. Only since the last century has the development of synthetic adhesives accelerated rapidly, and innovation in the field continues to the present.

I’ll admit, it would have been nice if this paragraph had touched on why, exactly, Europeans didn’t use glue until the Renaissance, especially if the Greeks and Romans and even the Neanderthals (for Pete’s sake) had used it. But it’s still a solid overview of progress in the field.

Thanks to this executive summary, you’ve now got an idea of:

• What glue is
• What the competing technologies are
• Why you would use glue
• Why you would NOT use glue
• When and how glue was first invented, and what the state of the art is today

It took only a few minutes to read that, and it was clear as day. Even if you decide that’s all you ever want to read about glue, you’ll still come away from Wikipedia’s executive summary better-informed about the technology than when you started reading it, and with only a minimum of effort. That’s what good technical writing is all about.