WHAT IS TECHNICAL WRITING? Myth and Reality

It is so often that technical writers are faced with the question:  What is technical writing and what do technical writers do?   Adding to this lack of understanding, are the myths surrounding the understanding of technical writing. In this blog post, let us explore the meaning and break some the myths of technical writing.

Myth 1: Technical Writing is only about writing User Manuals and Instructional Guides

Technical Writing, to a layperson appears to be that form of writing that tells people the “how to” of something. But in reality, technical writers apart from writing user guides for gadgets, applications, and products, also write a variety of other types of documents such as white papers, product literatures, business plans, proposals, training materials, functional specifications, data sheets, quick reference guides, release notes, online help, how to video’s, web pages, blogs, wikis, and internal company documents.

Myth 2: Technical Writing is “writing about technology”

Another common myth that is tagged on to technical writing is that, technical writing only means “writing about technology”. The misconception comes from our limited understanding of the word Technical. Technical does not necessarily mean technology, but more so it means skill or specialization. So technical writing is any specialized writing, not just in the domain of technology, but in all professions right from education, finance, stock market to recipe writing, because they all involve writing specialized reports specific to particular domains.

Myth 3: Technical Writers write always.

People fancy that a job of a technical writer is to write, and write, and write alone. But the truth is that only about 25% of the technical writer’s time is spent in actual writing. The rest of the time, a technical writer is researching to understand about the product,  communicating to product or software developers, finding out about the audience, the context for writing so that he can create content, organize it and give it a professional finesse. Besides writing they also work on videos and audio to help communicate

Technical Writing – Nutshell

Technical writers, or technical authors as they are known in UK, are the professional with a specialization in one or more fields whose work is to communicate to people clearly and concisely, processing information and organizing it in a way that complex concepts are made simple.

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