Personal Statement on the Field
If you aren’t clear on what kind of services I provide, please see the sections below for my take. For now, I’d like to explain why I’m passionate about this field.
Most people don’t read technical publications for fun, but Technical Communicators do! We know that writing technical documentation takes a lot of skill. It takes knowing how to create words and also how to effectively cull them. And too, we can still be creative while conveying things succinctly; according to Isaac Asimov, Antarctica’s Don Juan Pond contains about as much water as a typical American living room could hold. What a lovely and straightforward way to convey the thing.
Here’s my take:
What is a TECHNICAL COMMUNICATION?
For a career that concentrates on clear expression the Technical Communication field’s parameters can be a bit fuzzy, and our services are not well-known. After all, nobody gets a Pulitzer for an instruction manual. If a Technical Writer’s done their job well you’ll never even consider how the documentation got made. Rather, you’ll have a sense of pride in yourself for having figured out how to do something so simple.
What’s the difference between Technical Communication and Technical Writing?
There are many means of instruction, and Technical Communication encompasses all of them - videos, audio recordings, and writing (to include website content and blogging). A Technical Writer is a Technical Communicator, but a Technical Communicator isn’t necessarily a Technical Writer. I am both.
THE NATURE OF A TECHNICAL WRITER
Technical Writers need people skills to coax information out of many different SMEs, and a logical mind to translate and structure that information. Most people identify as either “left” or “right” brained, but we need to be both. I test at precisely 50% of each. Spot on!
Visual design plays a significant role in effectively conveying concepts to an audience (for example, the technical illustrations in an assembly guide). I have software to design these, but I also have a partnership with an in-house graphic designer. Literally! My husband, Patrick McCarthy, has a Fine Arts degree, and we sometimes collaborate on projects.
TECHNICAL WRITING
There are many niches within Technical Writing, and we typically write about specialized topics. We need a deep understanding of subject matter to convey content to an audience. Writer already familiar with an industry are valuable to it. That is why most of us who write about a highly technical subject typically have a background in it. So far what I write concentrates on administrative applications in the food, nonprofit, and education industries.
“If you can’t explain something simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”
We don’t need to be experts to write on a topic, however. We use our training to systematically approach issues to bridge the gap between the Subject Matter Experts (SME) and the end-users. The SMEs need to know at least certain aspects of the subject inside-out, the end-users need to know how the issue applies to them, and we need to know how to translate.