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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/21095
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/21095
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

The number one thing that you have to realize about technical writing is that people do not read it for its own sake. They read it because they are trying to do something and they need more information. The writing does not need to engage or entertain because the reader is already engaged with the task. It is their engagement with the task and their need for information that drives them to read on, not their engagement with the text.

And for this reason, technical writing should not attempt to engage or to entertain. Anything you do in that area just gets in the way of what the reader wants: getting the information they need to get back to the job they were doing.

Plainness and clarity of instruction and description are therefore key virtues in technical communication. That should not make technical writing a dull job, though. Rather, it presents a different set of writing challenges.

Making ideas, concepts, and tasks plain and clear is a challenge in its own right. And because the reader is often coming to the documentation with false ideas about how things ought to work, there is a real challenge in how to engage them and their thought processes and how to put their feet on the right path, particularly because their attitude is "just tell me which button to push!"

Finally, remember that while in all other forms of writing your goal is to attract and keep the reader's attention, in technical writing the goal is to get them back to what they were doing as quickly as possible. The less time they spend reading and the more time they spend successfully doing, the better your technical writing is.

Original score: 26