Know Your Audience

Technical writing is written communication whose primary aim is to convey:

• Particular information
• To a particular audience
• For a particular purpose

To present appropriate content, it is imperative to understand your audience and writing purpose.

Technical writing is, "translating technical ideas into words that a specific audience will understand."

Audience analysis is a key feature of all technical writing.

The technical writer's main role is to:

• Inform
• Instruct
• Persuade
• Inspire
• Involve The Reader

• What does the audience know?
• What do they need to know?
• In what order do they need to know it?

• quality content
• language
• format, and more

• Available
• Accessible
• Readable
• Simple
• Poignant
• Unequivocal
• Enjoyable(i.e., "user friendly").

Language and Professionalism

How one writes is as important as what one writes.

Language itself is important to enable readers to understand and believe the written text.

Language affects a reader's ability to comprehend and assimilate what a writer is presenting.

People judge things by their appearances.

Good impressions are essential when communicating in a business setting.

• Effectively
• Consistently
• Attractively

These elements strongly affect perceived writer and organizational credibility and professionalism -- highly sought-after commodities for individual and organizational success.

Most technical writing positions are still primarily offered to those who can write effective:

• End-user manuals
• System design documents
• Web sites, and the like for engineering and IT firms
• However, the need for technical writing is much broader than this.

A good technical writer can create informational media about a complicated technical subject or task in ways that almost anyone can clearly understand.

• In a format and manner that best suits the cognitive and psychological needs of the readers
• So they can respond to a document as its author intended
• And achieve the purpose intended for that document
• This purpose is primarily educational
• Secondarily it is also persuasion, technical writing may sometimes overlap with advertising or marketing

Precision in technical writing is critical because if anything is described incorrectly, readers may act improperly on what is said:

• Causing mistakes
• Problems at work
• In rare cases, company liability

• The process of gathering information from experts
• Presenting it to an audience in a clear, easily understandable form
• Technical writing and editing is an umbrella term for any sort of professional communication.
• It's the interface between your ideas and the rest of the world .

• Write
• Design
• Edit
  • Proposals
  • Manuals
  • Web pages
  • Lab reports
  • Newsletters
  • Professional documents

• When you are trying to learn a procedure or technique, you want to find the content and grasp the concepts quickly
• You want to find only pertinent instructions and bypass irrelevant sections.
• Through rapid scanning of technical material you should find your topic of interest and get a general idea of its scope at a glance.

Some characteristics of good technical writing include:

• Standardized form and formatting
• Hierarchical / Logical organization of content
• Cross References to supplemental content
• Judicious use of font style variations
• Extensive Index
• Images and visual aids

Technical Writing for your American Market

The success of your marketing campaign to the United States depends on linguistic cultural cues not noticed by software translators. When an American reads your web page containing grammar and usage mistakes, his opinion of your product is damaged. To improve the popularity of your web pages for an American market, you need a technical writer to review (and sometimes rewrite) the textual content of each web page or document to give it a sophisticated professional style. Only an educated native writer can provide the best words, grammar, and syntax for each application and market.

Contact Vincent Clark for all your technical writing needs

Vincent Clark has been a teacher for ten years and has wide experience in many technologies. His grasp of American English is profound. Writing is his passion and can be your ticket to improved sales to your American market.