October 8, 2024
What is technical writing?
I get this question whenever I tell people what I do (unsurprisingly), and so does probably every technical writer. The go to answer sounds along the lines of ‘someone who turns complex information into something understandable’ or ‘a writer that helps others perform a task’. But I don’t think those statements honor these questions well.
Ultimately, the aim of technical writing is to write in a way that teaches. They do this by: 1. Knowing the concept or procedure. 2. Knowing the person and why the concept or procedure is important to them. 3. Writing to the person about the concept, given the complexities of both the concept and the person.
I think the above points make technical communication a very interesting field. As a technical writer, you are constantly needing to think outside of yourself. Your job depends on other people needing to understand your writing, which usually requires you to bend and mold your writing to the language of the audience. This needs to be done in a way so that the conceptual and factual information still gets clearly communicated. This is a very unnatural thing to do. Very rarely do we see people able to communicate an idea in a way that is tailored to the people receiving it. Usually, people do the easier thing, which is to speak to people who don’t need you to translate terms or ideas into a language they can understand. Most people stick to groups that share commonalities with themselves. Why? It’s comfortable. It requires little effort to think about how someone similar to you will receive what you are communicating to them.
On the other-hand, even though it is uncomfortable to communicate across groups, that act of uncomfortable communication produces a new connection. This is exactly what a technical writer does - they make connections between groups. In a way, tech writers create bridges. Their writing provides a medium for people of different groups to understand information otherwise foreign to them.
There are more aspects of technical writing I want to dig into, but I will save that for a later date. I will continue to post blogs about tech writing, communication, tech writing tools, media, and other related topics. Hopefully my blog will have a subscribe feature where these posts can show up in your inbox whenever I post them. So, if you have read this far, stay tuned for updates!