Technical Writing in Transition - Part I

Summary: Once a necessary part of product deployment, technical writing is slipping to an afterthought. Why that's happening, and how to re-define technical writing to both overcome it and deliver better value, by experienced technical writer, developer and project manager Chris Borokowski.

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
-Robert A. Heinlein

Among technical writers, the state of the profession is a form of contention in itself. Many argue that assuming change is afoot is to knuckle under to the steady stream of buzzwords and fads that make a few venture capitalists rich while everyone else hits the job boards again. A growing faction of otherwise sceptical writers are thinking instead that transition is upon us, and will reward those who adapt.

To understand this change, we need to track the development of technical writing.

Originally a bizarre hybrid between psychologist, journalist, and instructor, the technical writer compiled scattered notes written by engineers and converted them into manuals that normal people could read and understand. This allowed the product-buying public to use technology with which they had no familiarity.

Technical writing through the 1950s and 1960s followed this pattern. Users were expected to have a high school education including some math and science, so much of the job involved explaining specifics in terms of the general skills with which users were more familiar. Gadgets varied widely and so the writer served an essential role, translating engineer complexity into end-user clarity.

With the transistor revolution of the 1970s, two crucial changes occurred. First, the computer migrated from the machine room to the desktop. Second, high schools got more lenient at the same time users became more acquainted with television media. This new generation were shaped by seeing machines used before understanding the principles behind them, which laid the ground for the interface revolution to follow.

On the heels of those developments, a second computing revolution occurred in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Both the graphical user interface (GUI)-based operating system and the world wide web took existing technologies and put them to new use. This usage redefined the comput from being being a calculating machine to an information browser. This role shift entailed thinking about interface in user-centric contexts and resulted in both these revolutions.

Usage exploded since the layperson could now interact with a computer as they would a video game, vending machine or automated teller. This in turn spurred a network revolution. Since the computer was viewed as an information browser, it needed connections to information, so the network became the computer. These influences caused the computer to become increasingly powerful, standardized and ubiquitous.

The standardization affected technical writing. Digital technology exists within an environment designed by the machine, and it makes sense to have single pieces of software handle functions so commonplace they should be standard. This means that, unlike physical technologies, digital machines have a language of interaction which makes most tasks similar in the actions they have in common.

Newer generations of users come to expect this standardized language, and that they can pick up a video game, computer program or phone and figure out the basics of its function with a few minutes of play. They may not have the background in physics, math and electronics that previous generations took for granted, but they do not need people to explain standard interfaces.

Now that the internet age has boomed and rebirthed itself, technical writing struggles to adopt this new role. Complexity has increased, but so has standardization, which means the userbase is well-informed about generalities but not specifics. As the audience has more tasks of a diverse nature, thanks to this efficiency boom, they expect specific knowledge distilled into digestible fragments for quick use. The job of the technical writer is as a result growing and shrinking at the same time.