What is Technical Writing?
How do you describe technical writing? One way is to think of items you may have at home, the car you drive, the television you watch or even the computer software you use. Each of these items came with a handbook, a manual or instructions, telling you what they are, how to use them and how to look after them.
You'll have noticed that each of these manuals has a writing style quite different to that encountered in a novel or in your daily newspaper. That's because what you're reading is not supposed to grab your attention. It's supposed to give you information in a clear, concise and unambiguous way about the product, system or application you're using.
This is the job of the technical writer.
They take technical information and present it in such a way as to remove ambiguity and to ensure that the information presented to you, the user, is as clear as possible. The technical writer structures the information to allow you to find what you need easily. Although there will always be some areas of a manual that you should read first, a successfully produced technical publication should be almost 'random access' in nature, ensuring that, no matter what subject you need to find, you can find it, ensuring enough is explained to give you the information you need and pointing you in the right direction for additional information.
Look again at the manuals you have at home and you'll see whether the technical writer, or technical author as they're also called, succeeded. We've all seen technical manuals and instructions that are misleading or just impossible to follow. In these cases, the writer has failed in his mission. Many, though, will not have been produced by an experienced technical writer. Some organisations will attempt to cut corners, either through ignorance or to control costs, and will choose to allow the engineers or designers of the product to write the user instructions or maintenance procedures. While it is vital that these people have a significant input to the information, their writing it does not always give the best results. Some engineers are not good communicators despite being technically gifted. Some will use too much jargon or will have insufficient experience to be able to take a user's viewpoint and design the documentation around them. This where the technical writer adds value.
A significantly different aspect of technical writing from that associated with creative writing, for example, is the technology used. Technical writing can be done using a multitude of media offering different advantages and benefits. Traditional word-processing applications are not always good at handling very large documents and their limitations can be restrictive and costly for the technical writer. While a great deal of technical writing is still done using standard word-processing applications such as MS Word, there is an increasing tendency towards re-usable, shareable, multi-format and multi-media publications. These are increasingly produced in format-independent mark-up language forms, such as SGML or XML allowing the information to be published in a variety of formats from a single source.
To find out more about SGML, take a look at the Overview of SGML Resources page on the w3.org website.