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What Is An Inference Gap?
How to find the missing facts and relationships in technical documentation that force readers and AI systems to guess
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Inference gap (noun)
A fact, condition, relationship, exception, or consequence that an audience needs but the content doesn’t explicitly state.
What Creates Inference Gaps?
Tech docs can be 100% accurate and still leave readers (and machines that access our content) completely in the dark. Sometimes an important fact is missing. More often, however, the writer understands exactly how the system works but fails to put those connections in our docs.
They leave out unwritten rules, like:
who a policy applies to
when it kicks in
what the exceptions are, or
how flipping one switch changes something else
When these connections in our content are missing, readers (human or otherwise) are forced to fill-in-the-blanks by guessing. A human might rely on trial-and-error, past experience, or interface clues. An AI tool will try to stitch scattered sentences together and invent an answer.
Sometimes they guess what the writer intended. Just as often, however, they get it wildly wrong. 😑
Guesswork is a problem when it changes how someone understands our instructions or makes them uncertain what action they should take or what happens if they get something wrong. We don’t have to explain every possible detail imaginable (that’s not a practical solution), but we need to connect-the-dots clearly enough that readers don’t have to guess to get a reliable answer.
Common causes include:
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