Getting Through With Technical Writing

Technical writing is a bit of a misunderstood profession that is carried out by very competent and talented professionals. A technical writer’s job is to take information about a product, process, or service and present it in a way that is able to be understood by whatever the intended audience would be. For example, if they were asked to write instructions on how to assemble a piece of furniture the first question they would ask would be about the intended audience. If it is determined that the average consumer would be the intended recipient then the information would be presented in a way that is easily understood by someone who is not an engineer or technically inclined. Their understanding of the product may be limited but it is their job to know the intended audience and collect the information necessary to get the point across.
In most cases a technical writer is not the person that created the product, process, or service. If we continue by using the furniture example above they’re not the engineer that designed the furniture and they are not the person that created and packaged the pieces that make up that furniture. They’re responsible as a translator is to take information from the engineer and the production people and put that information into the format that has been requested. If a more technical set of documents was required then the these writers would need to have enough of an understanding of the product to be able to put engineering terms into a format that is useful to other engineers.
While it is their job to translate and collect information it is not the their job to create any kind of industry jargon or lingo. In that way technical writing is not creative at all. Instead, these writers are asked to take the information they are given and put that information into a pre-determined format. Any of the new terms that are created regarding a product, process, or service are created by other people and that information is then given to the technical writer to be placed into the document.
They’re usually not an engineer although for many fields that employ technical writers it is not unusual for these people to have an engineering background. It is difficult for a writer to take scientific and engineering information and convert that into a form to be used for a specific audience without some understanding of the engineering or scientific concept behind the information.
A career in technical writing can sometimes offer little in the way of career advancement but like any other writing careers, a value can be added to this profession based on their ability to create useful documentation and based on the information given. Many times engineers and scientists get used to working with a particular kind of technical writer and when the engineers have a demand for your services you can usually look at that as job security.