Daniel G.

Riordan (Technical Report Writing Today)

Lois Johnson Rew (Introduction to Technical Writing: Process and Practice)

WHAT IS TECHNICAL WRITING?

Technical writing is about communicating key information to the people who need it in the most
suitable way and format. That might be printed material, but it could also be a graphic or a video.

That information might be a tutorial for a software application, a guide to using heavy machinery safely,
a diagnostic aide for medical practitioners or a guidance note about new legislation.

If you work in a technical or specialist field of any kind you may be a technical writer already.

According to the Society for Technical Communications, technical communication has one or more of
the following characteristics:1

1.Communicating about technical or specialised topics, such as computer applications, medical

2.Communicating through printed documents or technology, such as web pages, help files or social
media sites.

3.Providing instructions about how to do something, regardless of the task’s technical nature.

According to the Institute of Scientific and Technical Communicators:2

Technical communication tends to answer the six important questions. These are: what, when, why,
where, who and how – and often with an emphasis on the ‘how’. It may be provided as text, images,
video, simulations, online help or in a number of other formats. The information in technical
communication is targeted to the needs of the people using it to complete a task.

Technical writers are often translators. We take things that others may find complex or intimidating and
simplify them, making them clear and user friendly.

Your organisation will benefit from effective technical writing. Effective technical writing clears up
confusion, and helps people to understand crucial concepts, new systems and important procedures. A
help document that isn’t helpful or training materials that don’t help the trainer cost money, both in
terms of time spent and customer or employee satisfaction. The technical writer enables the business to
communicate more efficiently and more effectively – and if they encounter particular issues that cause
particular problems, they can be the early warning of issues the business really needs to fix.

Technical writing is often thought of as the creation of help files and user manuals, and it does include
those things. But it may also mean creating reports about technical or scientific issues, or writing safety
guidance on how to operate potentially dangerous products, or designing a flow chart on how to
troubleshoot an electric car, or creating the datasheet for a smartphone.

Although I’ll talk about technical writing throughout this book, technical writing in the 21st century
usually means more than just writing. The job of a technical writer is to help people with the things they
need to know, and to use whatever tools enable them to do that best – and today, that toolkit contains
all kinds of media and apps.
Muralikrishna M. et al (Communication Skills for Engineers, Second Edition) Introduction

Technical writing is a typical form of writing different from expressive, expository or descriptive writing.
Typically, technical writing requires give and take, a dialogue, a follow up, input and action. Most often,
it creates action, causes the person at the other end to react or respond. It is also a form of
documentation where processes are described, recorded and analyzed. Documentation could also be
about the different phases of a product life cycle or even the responses to a certain experiment or
exercise. Most often, these are in the forms of reports. It is important to emphasize here that there may
not be a single, one and only procedure of reporting or documenting. It is always need, and situation-
specific. There are three factors very important for technical writing – purpose, audience and tone. The
purpose of writing and the audience very often sets the ‘tone’ of a piece of writing. If you are writing to
someone above you, you are probably requesting or recommending action. But if it is someone below
you, you are directing action, instructing. Again, if you are writing a report solely for the purpose of
documenting, your language will be different. Similarly, if you are presenting a proposal and trying to
convince your colleagues, your tone will have to be persuasive.

Technical writing can be of various kinds. There can be reports or documents such as proposals, product
specifications, or quality test results. There can be instructions like user guides, online help, training and
user manuals. There can even be business proposals, status reports, customer documentation, and e-
mail reports. All these kinds of technical writing have unique formats, but there are general features
that are common to all of them.

All writing is aimed at achieving some purpose or the other. But technical writing is very specifically
aimed at achieving certain purposes. A good training manual will do exactly what it is intended to do. A
well-designed and well-written piece of technical writing has to take into consideration some important
factors even before the process of writing begins.

Judith Myers (Plain Language for Government Writing)

Technical writing involves writing, editing, and publishing information related to technology, medicine,
engineering, science, or a similar field.

We can distinguish technical writing from other types of writing by its:

♦ Writer ♦ Purpose ♦ Style ♦ Subject matter

One major difference between technical and other types of writing is the role of the writer. Unlike
business documents, which are usually written by one person, technical documents are often the result
of collaboration among the writer, subject matter expert, editor, and others.

The purpose of technical writing is to inform, instruct, describe, explain, or otherwise document
scientific or industrial processes and mechanisms.1

Because the primary purpose of technical and business writing is to convey information accurately, the
style of business and technical writing is utilitarian. The writer is not concerned with painting word
pictures or dazzling the reader with new and daring visions. The focus is on the information. The
technical writer aims to convey information as clearly, completely, and concisely as possible.

Technical writers deal with specific, factual subject matter related to engineering, computers and other
technology, and physical, biological, and social sciences. Technical writing is concerned with objects,
processes, systems, or abstract ideas. The focus is on describing and explaining. The reader should be
able to take away knowledge about how something works or how to do something. In addition to the
types of technical writing discussed in this chapter, many white papers and some laboratory reports
could be considered technical writing.