This article, like many on “technical writing” conflates techincal writing and writing about technology. In my estimation, they’re two different things.
Technical Writing is a profession with a massive set of practices, relatively well-prescribed goals, and a long history. It’s a discipline that has almost nothing to do with Stephen King and Strunk and White—though of course these sources might be applied. Chances are, if you were to ask an professional technical writer about resources for technical writing, they’d point you to a few text books on technical communication or papers or blog posts from people in the industry. Technical writing also has serious consequences. If a manual for a missile has mistakes, it could cost thousands of dollars or thousands of lives. Stephen King’s advice isn’t quite as helpful in such perilous situations.
Writing about technology, I think, is closer to what the author is actually pursuing here—and most tech blogs better fit this classification than technical writing. Writing about technology is more free form, more whimsical, full of opinion, intimations of possible approaches or solutions but not hardened proceedural documentation.
It might seem a bit pedantic to make such a distinction, but I would really love it if more people honored it. For instance, this article was a bit of false advertising, since I thought it’d be about technical writing in the professional sense (i.e. writing documentation) and not about writing about technology in a more casual, opinionated way. It’s similar to the distinction between programming and software engineering—they’re quite distinct pusuits, even though the tools and techniques considered overlap.
My guiding goal as a practicing technical writer is how do I transfer knowledge as efficiently as possible? For that reason I think it’s a skill that is applicable to anyone whose job depends upon a lot of collaboration, which is why I think we see the topic come up somewhat frequently here on HN.
I 100% agree that technical writing is a discipline with a specific meaning and is not the same thing as writing about technology.
Agreed. I too would have enjoyed a discussion of the challenges of technical writing. Especially since I feel like it is becoming increasingly common forego hiring technical writers and have engineers write documentation. Which is a shame because a lot of people rely on documentation for their work and inconsistent/low quality documentation really hurts a technical product.
You are not being overly pedantic, writing about the maintenance procedures and goals when maintaining nuclear medical equipment is technical writing, a Neil Stephenson novel is not.
Technical Writing is a profession with a massive set of practices, relatively well-prescribed goals, and a long history. It’s a discipline that has almost nothing to do with Stephen King and Strunk and White—though of course these sources might be applied. Chances are, if you were to ask an professional technical writer about resources for technical writing, they’d point you to a few text books on technical communication or papers or blog posts from people in the industry. Technical writing also has serious consequences. If a manual for a missile has mistakes, it could cost thousands of dollars or thousands of lives. Stephen King’s advice isn’t quite as helpful in such perilous situations.
Writing about technology, I think, is closer to what the author is actually pursuing here—and most tech blogs better fit this classification than technical writing. Writing about technology is more free form, more whimsical, full of opinion, intimations of possible approaches or solutions but not hardened proceedural documentation.
It might seem a bit pedantic to make such a distinction, but I would really love it if more people honored it. For instance, this article was a bit of false advertising, since I thought it’d be about technical writing in the professional sense (i.e. writing documentation) and not about writing about technology in a more casual, opinionated way. It’s similar to the distinction between programming and software engineering—they’re quite distinct pusuits, even though the tools and techniques considered overlap.