I've worked in technical communication for almost two decades. I've written user guides, online help, newsletters, tutorials, reference guides, API specifications, and user interface text. I've written the documentation for tax software, task-management software, science-lab hardware, and system-to-system technology used by the mortgage industry. I've even written humor columns and articles about technical communication.
My favorite aspect of technical communication is its diversity. To produce useful documentation, we as technical writers must know our products and their underlying technology, our users' goals, our users' industry, our tools, and our subject matter experts' temperaments. We have to know our way through a project, and we have to know our way around a sentence.
Let me say that again: We have to know our way around a sentence.
Consider your last project. Whether it was an online help system for flight-tracking software or a fact sheet for a webinar on aging, you probably did several things. You gathered the specifications for the project, talked to its developers, wrote user stories to reflect the project's requirements, used the product yourself, decided which tool would produce the right type of document, designed the appearance of the documentation, and outlined the content. And then, you sat down to write.
Now consider the project from the user's point of view. She probably heard or read about the software or webinar, launched the software or clicked a link, found her way to the information you wrote, and read it.
Think about that: You wrote; she read. All the planning you did, all the information you gathered, all the tools and technology you learned—in short, all the steps you took to package the information for the user—helped the user access the information. But it was the information itself she came looking for. And to understand that information, she needed language.
Language—the words writers use—links the writer to the reader. Language is what the writer uses to explain the product, and language is what the user needs to understand the product. Whatever else a help system uses to deliver a message to the user—images, video, web pages or printed ones—the message itself comes wrapped in language.
Technical writers know this; we know that our writing matters. Our language skills matter … don't they?
Karen Field Carroll is a senior technical writer, author, and plain language advocate. She and her husband live in Arizona with their German shepherd, Gunther, and their cat, Callie. Visit her blog at http://www.write2help.com.