We Explain Things

By Rick Lippincott | Associate Fellow

Over the past 15 years, our profession has undergone a sea change, and not for the better. We have gone from boom to bust, and many of us have heard colleagues say that the profession is dying. Some of us may have felt that way ourselves from time to time. It seems as though new products are fewer, staffing is smaller, and we’re not seeing the same pace of radical change as we did in the late 1990s or earlier in the 21st century. Compared to what we have experienced in the recent past, it may feel as though the need for technical communication is going away.

Those feelings are wrong. This cycle isn’t anything new, and our profession isn’t about to disappear. To quote J. M. Barrie (and later Ronald Moore): “All of this has happened before, and it will happen again.”

A large part of the problem has been economic. Our jobs depend on innovation and development, those happen more quickly and more often when there’s strong financial backing to support them. For the past several years, the financial backing has been lean. (When is the last time we’ve heard the words “venture capitalist” in conversation?)

The problem with economic cycles is exactly what the name implies: they cycle. For every upswing and peak, there’s a corresponding downswing and valley. In a famous sequence from the film Being There, Chance the gardener compares economic cycles to the seasons. He explained that every spring of growth and summer of abundance is followed by an autumn of decline and a winter of scarcity. However, spring always comes once again (www.imdb.com/title/tt0078841/quotes).

We do not fear an actual winter because we know spring will return, but we fear the slow times in the economy only because we’re unsure of when it will end.

We lived through the boom cycle of innovation that began in the 1990s, but we tend to forget this was only one in a series of booms that have had a positive impact on employment in our profession. Contrary to popular myth, tech comm didn’t start with the information age or early computing systems (no disrespect to Joseph Chapline’s 1949 work [www.writingassist.com/newsroom/first-technical-writer-joseph-chapline] intended). In reality, technical communicators have been around for a very long time.

More than a decade before the dot-com boom, there was an upswing in jobs. It was driven not only by technological advances, but also spurred in the United States by a period of rapid growth in defense and aerospace systems. At the same time, rising worldwide financial markets produced increased funding for product innovation (www.progressivefix.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/2010-July_Mandel.pdf).

Two decades before this, the 1960s saw an employment surge spurred by waves of electronics, defense, and space exploration as well as increased consumer goods. Everything from radar systems to toasters came with a set of instructions in those days, and each set of instructions was a job for a technical communicator.

A generation earlier there had been a wave of increased technical communication brought on by World War II. Aircraft, ships, and armored vehicles all needed operation and maintenance manuals. At the same time, there was also a demand for written processes and procedures for running the war effort. So much technical documentation was produced in this era that there remains a market among hobbyists for reprints of system operating manuals from that era (http://aviationshoppe.com/aircraft-manuals-documents-t-12.html).

Even earlier in the Roaring Twenties, a booming economy produced new products, systems, and devices. There were even technical writing opportunities available from companies such as Sears and Roebuck, at the time in the business of selling homes in kit form for assembly by the purchaser (www.searsarchives.com/homes).

A generation of writers before them had documented the products of a changing industrial base, as well as changing systems in transportation and communication. Further back, writers had been documenting the machines of the industrial revolution. Steam engines, ship operations, shoe manufacturing equipment, railroads, and other products kept technical communicators employed.

It goes back even farther.

In the late 14th century, Geoffrey Chaucer wrote what is commonly called the first English language technical manual (www.joh.cam.ac.uk/library/library_exhibitions/schoolresources/astrolabe/chaucer), although it may only be the oldest English manual that we’ve discovered. Chaucer’s manual explained the workings of an astrolabe.

An example of technical communication from the 12th century was recently featured on the cover of the British ISTC journal Communicator (www.istc.org.uk). The document was an illustrated set of instructions for sword fighting, a “manual of arms.”

We can continue to trace this path back literally to the dawn of civilization. In January 2014, the British Museum put on display a four-thousand-year-old clay tablet from ancient Mesopotamia. The cuneiform script, when deciphered, contained detailed instructions for building a type of boat known as a coracle (http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/wireStory/british-museum-prototype-noahs-ark-round-21654386).

Technical communication may not be the oldest profession, but it has been around in one form or another for a very long time. There is a reason why: human beings are inventors, and new systems or new items always require explanation for new users.

That’s where we come in: We explain things, and it is always the new that requires the greatest explanation.

True, the past few years have not been easy. As the economy has slowly recovered, it’s been obvious that (like many other professions) technical communication job numbers are fewer than they were before. We had gone through a perfect storm that included not just the dot-com bust and the post–9/11 recession (which spread worldwide), but also three more factors:

1. Desktop publishing systems reached an advanced state, which made our jobs easier. But the downside is that “easier” also means “each person can do much more,” which in turn means “fewer people needed.”
2. The wave of innovation in the 1990s slowed down as once-groundbreaking systems became standardized.
3. Techniques that had been new and strange in the beginning became commonplace and required less (or no) explanation.

The computer mouse is an example of the new becoming common. In the early to mid-1990s, most technical documentation would include an explanation of how to use a mouse. By the early 2000s, we were debating the need to include the chapter. Today, the debate is settled, and the mouse chapter lost. Similar examples are methods to navigate menus, export data, or print information. Most of our audience already knows how to do these things, because the operations are standardized and ubiquitous.

Some of the jobs that we held during the dot-com boom may be gone, but it is only because those jobs are completed. We normally don’t document older technology; we deal with the new.

It’s possible that at every stage in history where there has been a plateau in development, those who produced the instructions and explanations likely thought it was the end of an era because they could not foresee the next wave. When jobs folded in the early 1970s, the writers of the time could not have imagined that the foundation of the next big new wave had already been set with two late-1960s events: the famous “Mother of all Demos” at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in December 1968 (www.dougengelbart.org/firsts/dougs-1968-demo.html), and the creation of ARPANET, first deployed at the end of October 1969 (www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/edn-moments/4399541/ARPANET-establishes-1st-computer-to-computer-link–October-29–1969). Few in their wildest dreams could have envisioned where this would lead.

There have always been people tasked to provide information and procedures on things that were both complex and new for their era. There always will be. The method of information delivery has changed with the years. It probably will change again in our lifetime.

That brings us to ask the obvious: What are the new things that we might expect to provide new job opportunities?

• Mobile—We are witnessing another sea change in the delivery of information. A smaller screen with limited controls demands entirely new methods of communication. Documentation for individual mobile apps may be smaller, but the volume of applications will be higher. Smaller devices with smaller interfaces require more precision in their explanations. We are the right people to provide those explanations.
• Video—Some technical communicators worry that company-issued documentation may be superseded by consumer-based video instruction on the Web. We’re looking at this exactly backward: the appearance of “home video” solutions indicates that there is a demand for clear visual instruction. We are the people who should be creating it. Business for the moment may feel that they can take advantage of the current free labor; the downsides for them include liability risks and possible endangerment of trademark. The rule of thumb for a good video production (including scripting, setup, recording, and editing) is about one hour of production time for each minute of final video. That adds up to a lot of work.
• Commercial Space—If expectations hold, activities by companies such as SpaceX and Orbital Sciences may present wide new avenues for us. There are three avenues of job creation: documentation of spacecraft operation and maintenance, documentation of payloads, and new product development that results from manufacturing and processing in microgravity and hard vacuum. This third area is the one that holds the greatest potential for our jobs.
• Virtual Reality—Google Glass may well have the potential to revolutionize our methods of information delivery. A hint of the future can be gleaned from the iPhone-based “virtual” owner’s manual for the Audi A1 and A3 automobiles. The potential for Google Glass and similar technologies is an active, animated process that walks the user through a complete procedure, projecting visual highlights exactly over the items that require the next action, and perhaps even noticing (and advising on) errors before the user can spot them. These processes would be at as far beyond what the approaches we’re using now as Web-based delivery was beyond printed paper manuals.

One problem of being a technical communicator is that we’re on the bleeding edge of technology change and technology development, and from there often it is difficult to imagine what will come next. Professionals in other fields may be able to project what they will be doing five years down the road based on trends in business, or the plans being made today for items that will be manufactured in the future. We, on the other hand, cannot be certain what we will be writing about in five years, because it hasn’t been invented yet.

The need for technical documentation (no matter what the form) will continue. With literally four thousand years of technical communication history behind us, there’s a certainty that years, decades, and even centuries into the future we will still be around because of one simple reason: We explain things. People have always needed explanations, and they always will.

Rick Lippincott (@rjl6955) is an STC Associate Fellow and technical writer at AS&E, documenting high-energy X-ray systems. He was president of the STC Boston Chapter and later STC New England, where he is now social media manager. Past documentation jobs included transport aircraft, jet engines, ion implanters, and other systems he calls “heavy metal.” For fun, Rick builds aircraft scale models and practices martial arts (but not at the same time). Rick is the author of the Squadron/Signal publication C-5 Galaxy in Action.