Technical Communication:
What, Why and How

You may not know any technical communication professionals, but our work helps make your life better and easier.

We work throughout today’s technological world (and in many areas that you don’t think of as high-tech, but where clear communication of facts and procedures is important). In the corporate milieu or as freelances, we create and improve the help files for your computer and the procedures for turning your time card into a bank deposit. We work on the grant proposals and business plans through which funding is obtained and the reports and articles that tell the world about the results. We do this by using the Web, CDs and DVDs, and the paper documents that, despite all the advances in technology, seem to keep getting more important.

At least this is true when companies understand the benefit of communicating clearly... and the cost of communicating badly. If customers have been overloading a service hotline because a user manual did not meet their needs, or five hundred employees wasted two hours apiece because a memorandum was ambiguous, it’s time to invest in expert services.

Professional Societies, Professional Growth

Here’s how to explore what we do and learn where to find us.

IEEE PCS

Besides publishing a journal, the Professional Communication Society of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers sponsors a conference every year. I chaired IPCC 01 in Santa Fe. Now is a great time to think of what you might present at the next IPCC, July 13-16 in Montreal.

ACM SIGDOC

SIGDOC is the Special Interest Group on Documentation in the Association for Computing Machinery.

Other IEEE Societies and ACM SIGs cover areas of interest to this profession and are worth investigating.

STC

The Society for Technical Communication has opportunities for you to...

  • Share your talents. The STC web site includes links to the regional and local-chapter pages so you can get involved in the participatory heart of STC activities.

  • Explore our profession. Their next conference will be held June 1-4, 2008, in Philadelphia, PA. Also available are topical and regional meetings.

  • Measure your achievements against the best of the best. The first-round technical-publication competitions such as Touchstone (Northern California) typically call for entries around August or September. Then come judging, awards, and advancement to international competition for top winners. If you’ve missed this year’s deadline, think about what you might enter next time and let your colleagues know about the opportunity. I’ve been both an entrant and a judge and can assure you of coming away from either experience with valuable contacts and a new perspective on your work. Some STC chapters or groupings of chapters also have technical art competitions.

    • Other Societies of Interest...

  • National Association of Science Writers (science journalism).

  • International Association of Business Communicators (marketing, PR, et cetera).

  • Technology Section of the Public Relations Society of America.

  • National Association of Government Communicators.

  • Society for Scholarly Publishing.

    Further Online Resources

  • Learn Good Online Design Through Bad Examples . Kudos to Vincent Flanders for a tutorial whose examples and discussions can be studied in a very worthwhile hour or browsed in less. Also includes links to resources for site and page design and implementation.

  • Best Viewed With Any Browser: Campaign for a Non Browser Specific WWW tries (among other goals) to preserve the universality and interoperability inherent in the original vision of the Web. Includes links to many useful resources on Web design and related graphics issues.

  • The University of Victoria Writer’s Guide: not about technical writing as usually construed, but nonetheless very useful as a guide to the basics and finer points of composition.

  • The Online Writery at the University of Missouri.

    •  To use the resources listed below, called news groups for historical reasons even though they’re really discussion forums with various degrees of openness, use a stand-alone newsreader or the one built into your Web software, or Google Groups in a regular browser window.

  • bit.listserv.techwr-l — a newsgroup/mailing list about tech writing.

  • bit.listserv.mbu-l — Megabyte University, where you can get in touch with your inner professor.

  • comp.edu.composition — the intersection of computers and the means, methods, and products of composition. Has some considerable though obscure relationship to MBU-L.

  • misc.writing — general purpose newsgroup about the act, nature, and profession of writing (not for posting manuscripts to share or critique).

    • My homepage.

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