Technical Communication: A Reflective Essay

Introduction

My first introduction to technical communication did not occur in the expected place. I didn’t hear about it from an English class, someone working in the industry, or an article about how to make a career in writing. Up until that point, I was still under the assumption that writers were penniless, starving artists living in “vans down by the river.” At least, that’s what my parents told me throughout high school every time I mentioned attending college to be a writer. I can’t be too hard on my parents because they meant well by wanting me to do something ‘practical’ so I could excel in life.

So, imagine my shock when I heard about technical communication during the very first semester of my very ‘practical’ computer science degree program. My Business Computer Information Systems professor, a retired computer science wiz and business manager, decided to spend a good twenty minutes lecturing the class on all the terrible writers in the computer industry (and industry in general), including all the managers that were desperate for effective communicators. I recollect him telling the class that the business industry was short on technical writers and communicators and that we could make a lucrative living if we could effectively communicate. At that moment, I felt like a secret had finally revealed itself to me, and I knew exactly what I wanted to do with my life.

Later that day, I switched my degree plan to general studies and decided I would figure out how to become a technical writer, although I still wasn’t entirely sure what that title meant. Fortunately, I would discover technical writing (and more) during my technical communication master’s degree program at Texas State University. Here are the valuable lessons I learned during my graduate education about what it means to be a technical communicator and what sets us apart as writers.

How to Write for the Audience

I admit that I didn’t understand how to write for an audience, even with all the advanced English writing courses I took in high school; and later, when I completed my bachelor’s degree in anthropology, I still didn’t quite grasp the concept. During my education, I was smart enough to understand that I should write in a way the teacher wanted, which would garner me A grades, and I was very successful in understanding the ‘teacher’ audience. However, when I started to examine myself as a writer during my graduate education, I realized I needed a process for determining the audience. In fact, I realized I needed many strategies for creating writing that effectively communicated not what I wanted but what the audience needed. This realization changed my writing process. Before writing, I began to evaluate why an audience needed the writing and who needed to understand it. Audience evaluation is now the first step in my writing process; when previously, my first thought was what do I want to say.

One of the ways I’ve learned to ensure that I’m strategically thinking about the audience has been through developing an audience checklist. This checklist lists questions for me to consider when determining who my audience is. Before writing, I utilize my audience checklist to discover my audience and how I can best serve them. My list includes questions like:

• What is my audience’s education level?

• What are the audience’s needs?

• What are the audience’s experiences and motivations?

• What communities is the audience a part of?

• What patterns does my audience display?

• What task(s) does my audience hope to accomplish?

From this list I am able to develop a document user persona, or personas, that helps guide and validate my writing choices.

Today, as a writer, I employ more empathy when writing for my audience and try to understand their point of view before creating a communication. I now attempt to expand these ideas past traditional writing, like essays, tutorials, and reports, and incorporate them into all my daily communications. Many benefits come with considering the audience before communicating, but the two most significant benefits I’ve found in my personal correspondence are greater receptivity and reductions in miscommunication.

Another key component to furthering my understanding of the audience has been my graduate-level development in usability research and testing. I’ve gained valuable insights into my audience and document users by employing research methods based in the social sciences and linguistics. Having established some theoretical understanding during my undergraduate degree in anthropology, my technical communication program delved deeper into research as a practice. I learned many valuable lessons during projects which included usability testing as a key strategy for creating usable documents. I engaged practices in card sorting, interviews, focus group interviews, surveys, questionnaires, observations, discourse analysis, and task-based software testing.

One of the most valuable lessons I learned during all this practice was explaining my research to the outside, non-research audiences. In conducting the various usability reports attached to this portfolio, I’ve been able to develop a process for recording, explaining, and visualizing research methods, data, outcomes, and recommendations. Having skills for effectively sharing research outcomes with a general audience places me in a better position to advocate for the users I study and their needs.

Understanding, demonstrating, and explaining what an audience and document user needs sets technical communicators apart from many communication professionals.

How to Write for Accessibility

Discovering how to write for accessibility has become a central theme of my technical communication journey. Where in the past, I might have selected a decorative font or color scheme for my guilty pleasure, I am now concerned with the accessibility of my work. I now consider the audience member who needs assistive reading technology, closed captions, and plain language. When I develop new pieces, I implement accessibility guidelines according to the worldwide W3C Web Accessibility Initiative. Adhering to these guidelines means considering my documents’ headings, hierarchies, and color contrasts for the visually impaired.

Additionally, I learned the importance of adding alt-text to website images, icons, and graphics so assistive reading technology does not slow the reader down or miss pertinent details. A lack of online alt-text is a frustrating experience for the document user with assistive technology, and making the audience’s life easier is a core value of technical communication. Adding alt-text is a small step in the writing process that adds a great deal of value to an audience member’s life.

Writing for accessibility also means utilizing more rhetorical judgment during language selection by considering the audience’s education level and language proficiency. As a technical communicator, I now understand I will reach a wider audience with more straightforward language. I try to avoid jargon, idioms, and complicated sentence structures if possible. Clear and concise language is easier on readers’ minds [and patience, I might add], so I now strive for this.

Understanding, accounting for, and including the accessibility measures for an audience and document user sets technical communicators apart from many communication professionals.

Strategies for Planning and Managing Time

One of the biggest lessons I learned during my graduate education was the importance of planning and time management. I think like many high school and undergraduate students proficient in writing, I tended to wait until the last minute to complete a five-page essay simply because I could. During my time as a graduate student, I discovered the value of planning ahead and creating a process for managing my work and my time. The value of my planning demonstrates itself in the organizational quality and functionality of the pieces I created during graduate school. My planning practices also show themselves in this portfolio which I started planning and developing in my second semester. The more time I gave to the planning of my documents directly impacted the quality of the document’s layout, language, headings, hierarchies, and content.

Content is especially impacted by planning because the more planning I allot to a document, the more audience development and testing I am able to include. Fully planning a document from start to finish includes calculating the time for research, writing, editing, user testing, and user testing adjustments including rewriting, designing, or editing the documents to better accommodate the audience’s needs. My planning process includes its own set of documents such as proposals, schedules, user testing forms, surveys, questionnaires, consent forms, and Gantt charts to track my progress.

Planning and time management are especially important in today’s collaborative workplace, and particularly important in writing and research teams. Learning to stay diligent about communicating with my graduate team members was an important lesson in my educational development. Strategies I employed during team projects included utilizing Google Drive to keep a detailed share file of (1) our regular team meeting cadence, (2) notes and agendas, (3) research plans, and (4) writing and editing files. In utilizing a central communication depository like Google Drive or Microsoft Teams my teammates and I were collectively using technical communication to effectively complete our projects.

Understanding the importance of group communication and effectively implementing group communication strategies during teamwork sets technical communicators apart from many communication professionals.

Incorporating Learning New Technologies

About halfway through the first semester of my technical communication graduate program, I realized learning new technologies and tools was going to be an important part of my learning journey. Until that semester, I had very little repetitive use of the extended features of Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, and had never used Adobe Creative Suite products. As I progressed along my technical communication path, the need for increasing my skills with design and research software became apparent. In the process, I realized my acquisition of these software programs was greatly dependent on the technical writing documents I hoped to create in the future. This presented me with the unique opportunity to evaluate and familiarize myself with the tutorials, references, and procedures of various software programs while I learned from them. During my graduate program, I expanded my knowledge with the following applications through my work: Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft PowerPoint, Microsoft OneNote, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe InDesign, Adobe Rush, Adobe XD, iMovie, Qualtrics, Google Forms, Google Drive, Gato, and Wix.

One of the important skills a technical communicator learns is how to learn new things and translate that knowledge into written works for others. During my technical communication education, I learned to evaluate the learning process and translate this into a method for creating instructional documents. These methods include (1) observing users' actions (2) breaking users' actions into tasks, and (3) translating those tasks into written instructions. Instructional documents often include abstract and novel ideas. In these instances, when direct observation is not possible, methods for creating documents might include alternative options like interviewing users or subject matter experts. During my educational growth, I was able to utilize these various practices to create short works like the recipes and usability reports included in this portfolio work.

Understanding the importance of learning new technologies and creating a process for translating the learning process into written texts sets technical communicators apart from many communication professionals.

Incorporating Technical Communication into Everyday Life

Now that I’ve completed my educational requirements to become a master in technical communication, I find that technical communication principles have become a standard practice in my everyday life. Technical communication has become a mindset and lens that I view all my communication through. This mindset demonstrates itself in the simplest texts like emails and announcements to the most complicated like reports and essays.

My technical communication skills have been a blessing during my role as President of my condominium association. As our condominium community tackles considerable construction housing issues due to builder negligence my technical communication skills have helped me properly communicate with the community, contractors, and other Board members working to correct the issues.

I’ve been able to have more empathy for the condominium community members and present the information in a way that empowers them to participate in something that has been very disempowering for many of us in my community. I’ve also been able to set clear expectations and guidelines with the contractors by presenting technical construction information and directions in a clear and concise way.

Soon, when the project commences, I know I will adequately keep residents abreast of scheduling and safety considerations due to my understanding of technical communication. I would not have been able to effectively manage such a large project without the expansion of my knowledge of technical writing and genres such as proposals and request letters for quotes. Fortunately, my technical communication playbook provided me with the tools to manage these everyday communication needs with greater ease and confidence.

Utilizing clear and effective communication to empower participants in everyday communication sets technical communicators apart from many communication professionals.

Understanding the Power of My Words

Finally, I would be amiss if I did not mention that my technical communication journey has led me to a deeper understanding of the power of words and symbols and the importance of access to that power. When I spoke of accessibility above, I spoke of access in terms of accounting for different abilities and educational levels. However, there is another consideration technical communicators should employ, and these considerations are ethical ones.

As I detail in many writings in this portfolio, information directly impacts audiences and document users. Therefore, it is important that I consider the ethical harm I can create with my writing. This consideration is one of the hardest factors to create strategies for and requires the most rhetorical judgment for me as a technical communicator. Some ethical concerns I now consider every time I write include privacy and confidentiality concerns, plagiarism and copyright, equity and inclusion, accessibility, and disclosure.

Strategies I’ve developed during my educational journey include being transparent in my dealings with document users about what research I’m conducting, why I’m conducting it, and how the information will be used. Additionally, I understand that I must consider a document users’ privacy and confidentiality concerns and not seek information that may be considered unnecessary for the user task or product. As a technical communicator, my goal is to gain access only to the information that helps me create effective documents for users and nothing more. I now understand how to take extra care in diligently managing and referencing all outside primary and secondary sources, not because my assignment tells me to, but because it’s ethically valuable that audiences can easily find the source information if they need to.

I now spend more time considering the equity, inclusion, and accessibility I’m creating with my writing. This is something I didn’t consider before my technical communication learning journey. Again, I focused more on what I wanted to say and less on what was being done with what I said in my previous education. I’ve found a good strategy for being more inclusive in my writing is to consider the opposite of my first assumption and plan for as many other possibilities as possible. More possibilities generally mean more users, and this can seem overwhelming, but this strategy helps me acknowledge and adjust for my own initial bias.

For example, if I assume that all universities are full of young full-time students and develop a content strategy that focuses solely on that user persona then I might be alienating a large number of potential students that feel they aren’t student material for the university campus. As a non-traditional older working student, I know other student realities exist, and therefore, I should expand my content strategy to include age-inclusive language. As a technical communicator, I’ve learned to seek bias in my writing and ask myself if I’m missing other perspectives. I now understand that I should seek other perspectives when determining and evaluating my audience prior to writing to ensure I’m not inherently blind to an audience because of my own situated understanding.

Finally, full disclosure of my research and writing intentions, methods, and sources is a key component to developing ethos with the audience. A writer’s ethos builds trust with the audience and this trust isn’t something to abuse or take lightly. Poorly created documents and misinformation can, and have, caused dire consequences for users of those documents. This is evident from the many home appliances and garage tools with large warning labels on them. Poorly communicated technical information can cause someone their life and this is one of the many reasons technical communication and technical communicators are so important.

Understanding the power and influence writing has on an audience and employing ethical strategies to reduce user harm and increase equity and inclusion sets technical communicators apart from many communication professionals.

Conclusion

Like many technical communicators, I did not take a straight line toward my technical communication education. I experienced many detours and setbacks along my educational journey and consider myself fortunate to have stumbled across technical communication as a field in the first place. Back then, I didn’t realize I would learn so much beyond writing and editing during my technical communication journey. Instead, I’ve developed a whole new way of thinking about human interaction with communication and language systems.

As I look forward, I realize that my journey is still only beginning. I know that my future still holds so much more to learn, new strategies to develop, ethical dilemmas to decipher, and additional technologies to tackle. I acknowledge that my understanding of rhetorical judgment, research methods, and technical communication principles equip me to face this future. The future is an invigorating prospect and I look forward to doing great work.