What is technical communication?
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An academic side
As technical communication has matured as a profession, an academic discipline has grown up alongside it. The academic side of technical communication has accumulated its own body of academic knowledge, but it also shares common ground with many other fields such as philosophy, psychology, physiology, and education.
The results of research filter down to those technical communicators—the great majority—working in commerce and industry through courses, conferences, and professional societies. Academic researchers are primarily concerned with theory. So their industrial counterparts usually have the task of translating the theories into processes and activities that are practical and beneficial in the workplace.
Putting users first
If technical communication is about helping technology users, a technical communicator must understand the interests and concerns of those users. To design user-centred publications, technical communicators must pay particular attention to two key ideas:
- Users are not some uniform, anonymous mass of people. They are individuals with identifiable needs, experiences, and preferences.
- People rarely use technology in vague, unstructured ways. They generally want to use the technology to achieve clear goals or objectives.
So technical communicators begin projects by analysing the target audience for their publications and by performing a task analysis, which identifies users' goals. The results of these analyses guide all subsequent activities. Technical communicators need to abandon their egos and their own stylistic preferences when developing content. The audience analysis should, for example, guide the selection of an appropriate terminology and writing style for text. The results of a task analysis help determine the scope and structure of a publication. Users find technical information easier to use if it is "task-oriented"—organised in a way that reflects how users will work with a product.
A user-centred approach to communication lies at the heart of technical communication, but it clearly has uses beyond the world of science and technology. Indeed technical communication offers ideas and guidelines that can improve the transfer of knowledge in most situations where you can characterise the members of the audience and understand their goals. For example, the instructions on a pack of cake mix demonstrate many of the principles advocated by technical communicators. Similarly, technical communication offers guidelines that would be useful if you wanted, for example, to design a reader-friendly tax-return form or plan an effective video promoting better childcare.
Work that users never see
You cannot really understand the full extent of a technical communicators' work by looking at a manual, a help file, or a web site. These examples of packaged information are just the end product of a process. That process begins with research, analysis, and planning. Then, as communicators begin to record ideas as words and pictures, they also begin a series of coordination and quality-control activities. On some projects, some communicators never create any of the end publications' content because they are occupied solely with project or quality management.
Technical communicators often contribute to development projects in ways that are less obvious. They need to spend a significant amount of time discussing ideas with people both within and outside the development team. The resulting exchange of ideas invariably improves the team's general level communication. Because technical communicators have contact with many different people, they acquire a good overview of a project. By contrast, technical personnel usually have a very narrow view because they typically concentrate on just one aspect of the product or the development cycle. Consequently, technical communicators are often better-placed to identify conflicts or inconsistencies in different parts of a project's work.
Technical personnel become so familiar with, and emotionally attached to, their product that they tend to become blind to some of its faults. Technical communicators try to view the product through the eyes of end users. From this perspective, they are more likely to identify certain types of problems and they can propose solutions. In such situations, technical communicators can often suggest ways to improve a product's usability.
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Copyright © 2003 Stephen P. Reynolds. All rights reserved.
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