Essays on Technical Writing

Second, the risk of mental harm. A person’s self-esteem, and general mental wellbeing, can be affected by the degree of confidence they have in their ability to understand the written material they need to understand. For example, a young apprentice having difficulty understanding operating instructions may give up their chosen trade because of a mistaken belief that they do not have the intelligence to succeed in it. Mistaken? If their difficulty arises not from poor language skills on their part but from carelessness on the part of the writer of those instructions, then the apprentice’s belief that they are not up to it might very well be mistaken. Their chosen career might be denied them by the thoughtlessness or laziness of writers who have provided them with vague or impenetrable instructions.

End-user assistance professional

And thus instead of technical writer we have technical communicator, content provider, end-user assistance professional, information designer, documentation developer, documenter, and so on.

four features that are still valued today, namely:
• structured formatting and page design
• an awareness of the needs and abilities of the audience
• a plain, utilitarian prose style and
• augmenting verbal description with visual presentations. (Tebeaux 1997, p. 133)

“Technical writing is a form of written communication that conveys scientific and technical information in a clearly defined and accurate form.”