Reading Assignment

What Is Technical Communication? 1 3

THIS TEXTBOOK EXPLORES how people in the working world !nd, create, and deliver technical information. Even if you do not plan on becoming a technical communicator (a person whose main job is to produce documents such as manuals, reports, and websites), you will often !nd yourself writing documents on your own, participating in teams that write them, and contributing technical information for others who read and write them. The purpose of Practical Strategies for Technical Communication is to help you learn the skills you need to communicate more e"ectively and more e#ciently in your professional life.

People in the working world communicate technical information for a number of purposes, many of which fall into one of two categories:

r� To help others learn about a subject, carry out a task, or make a decision. For instance, the president of a manufacturing company might write an article in the company newsletter to explain to employees why management decided to phase out production of one of the company’s products. Administrators with the Social Security Administration might hire a media-production company to make a video that explains to citizens how to sign up for Social Security bene!ts. The board of directors of a community-service organization might produce a grant proposal to submit to a philanthropic organization in hopes of being awarded a grant.

r� To reinforce or change attitudes and motivate readers to take action. A wind-energy company might create a website with videos and text intended to show that building windmills o" the coast of a tourist destination would have many bene!ts and few risks. A property owners’ association might create a website to make the opposite argument: that the windmills would have few bene!ts but many risks. In each of these two cases, the purpose of communicating the information is to persuade people to accept a point of view and encourage them to act—perhaps to contact their elected representatives and present their views about this public-policy issue.

Notice that when you communicate in the workplace, you always have a clear purpose—what you want to achieve—and an audience—one or more people who are going to read the document, attend the oral presentation, visit the website, or view the video you produce.

What Is Technical Communication? Technical information is frequently communicated through documents, such as proposals, emails, reports, podcasts, computer help !les, blogs, and wikis. Although these documents are a key component of technical communica- tion, so too is the process: writing and reading tweets and text messages, for example, or participating in videoconference exchanges with colleagues. Technical communication encompasses a set of activities that people do to discover, shape, and transmit information.

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Technical communication begins with listening, speaking, and reading. For instance, an executive reads an article about a new kind of computer security threat. She doesn’t understand all the details of the threat, but she concludes that it could hurt her company’s IT infrastructure. She sets up a meeting with her IT supervisor to see whether he knows about it and thinks it could be a problem. It turns out that he is aware of the issue and has been doing some research about it. The executive asks him to keep going, discuss it with his IT colleagues, and contact her next week.

A week goes by, and the IT supervisor gets back to the executive. He tells her that his research suggests the threat is real and serious. She asks him to write a recommendation report discussing the nature and scope of the threat and presenting a strategy for combatting it.

How does the IT supervisor begin to write that report? He starts by speak- ing with his colleagues in the company and outside it, and then reading dis- cussion boards, blogs, and trade magazines online. Next, he devises a plan to have various people in IT draft sections of the report, and he creates a sched- ule for posting their drafts to the company’s online writing space, Google Drive, so that all the team members can read and comment on the report as it develops. Ten days later, after he and his team have revised, edited, and proofread the report, he sends it to the executive.

But that’s not the end of the story. The executive reads the report and agrees with the team’s !ndings: the company needs to make some changes to the IT infrastructure and invest in new software to combat this serious security threat. She decides to meet with her own colleagues to see if they agree. She points them to the report and sets up a meeting for later that week.

When you produce technical communication, you use the four basic com- munication skills—listening, speaking, reading, and writing—to analyze a problem, !nd and evaluate evidence, and draw conclusions.

These are the same skills and processes you use when you write in col- lege, and the principles you have studied in your earlier writing courses apply to technical communication. The biggest difference between technical communication and the other kinds of writing you have done is that techni- cal communication has a somewhat different focus on audience and purpose.

In most of your previous academic writing, your audience has been your instructor, and your purpose has been to show your instructor that you have mastered some body of information or skill. Typically, you have not tried to create new knowledge or motivate the reader to take a particular action— except to give you an “A” for that assignment.

By contrast, in technical communication, your audience will likely include peers and supervisors in your company, as well as people outside your company. Your purpose will likely be to reinforce or change their attitudes toward the subject you are writing about, to motivate them to take particular actions, or to help them carry out their own tasks.

For example, suppose you are a public-health scientist working for a fed- eral agency. You and your colleagues just completed a study showing that, for

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The Challenges of Producing Technical Communication 1 5

most adults, moderate exercise provides as much health bene!t as strenuous exercise. After participating in numerous meetings with your colleagues and after drafting, critiquing, and revising many drafts, you produce four different documents:

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r� B�QSFTT�SFMFBTF�UP�EJTUSJCVUF�UP�QPQVMBS�QSJOU�BOE�POMJOF�QVCMJDBUJPOT

r� B�CMPH�QPTU�BOE�QPEDBTU�GPS�ZPVS�BHFODZ�T�XFCTJUF

In each of these documents, you present the key information in a different way to meet the needs of a particular audience.

The Challenges of Producing Technical Communication Most people in the working world don’t look forward to producing technical communication. Why? Because it’s hard to do.

For instance, your supervisor has !nally approved your request to buy a scanning-electron microscope (SEM) for your department and given you a budget for buying it. It would be nice if all you had to do now was list the important features you need in an SEM, read a couple of articles about SEMs, check off the ones that have those features, and then buy the best one that !ts your budget.

Unfortunately, life is not that simple, and neither is technical communica- tion. If it were, this book would be about a dozen pages long.

Technical communication is challenging, and not primarily because SEMs are complex devices, although they are. Technical communication is chal- lenging because people are complicated, and collaborating with people is at the heart of the process.

As soon as you have decided you need an SEM that can detect signals for secondary electrons, for instance, someone on your team argues that you also need to detect signals for back-scattered electrons and character- istic"X-rays. Someone else on the team disagrees, arguing that an SEM that detects those additional signals costs an additional $15,000, putting it beyond your budget, and that on those rare occasions when you need those func- tions you can send the samples out for analysis. Another team member sug- gests that you wait until next year, when SEM manufacturers are expected to release products with improved signal-detection functions. You realize that with the complications your colleagues have presented, you won’t be pur- chasing an SEM any time soon. You do more research, keeping their concerns in mind.

The good news is that there are ways to think through these kinds of com- plications that will help you communicate better. No matter what document you produce or contribute to, you need to begin by considering three sets of factors:

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r� Audience-related factors. Does your audience know enough about your subject to understand a detailed discussion, or do you need to limit the scope, the amount of technical detail, or the type of graphics you use? Does your audience already have certain attitudes or expectations about your subject that you wish to reinforce or change? Will the ways in which your audience uses your document, or the physical environment in which they use it, affect how you write? Does your audience speak English well, or should you present the information in several languages? Does your audience share your cultural assumptions about such matters as the need to spell out details or how to organize the document, or do you need to adjust your writing style to match a different set of assumptions? Does your audience include people with disabilities who have needs you want to meet?

r� Purpose-related factors. Before you can write, you need to determine what you want your audience to know or believe or do after having read your document. Although much technical communication is intended to help people perform tasks, such as installing a portable hard drive for a computer, many organizations large and small devote signi!cant communication resources to branding: creating an image that helps customers distinguish the company from competitors. Most companies now employ community specialists to coordinate the organization’s day- to-day online presence and its social-media campaigns.

r� Document-related factors. Does your budget limit the number of people you can enlist to help you or limit the size or shape of the document? Does your schedule limit how much information you can include in the document? Does your subject dictate what kind of document (such as a report or a blog post) you choose to write? Does the application call for a particular writing style or level of formality? (For the sake of convenience, I will use the word document throughout this book to refer to all forms of technical communication, from written documents to oral presentations and online forms, such as podcasts and wikis.)

Because all these factors interact in complicated ways, every technical document you create involves a compromise. If you are planning to make a video about installing a water heater and you want the video to be easily understood by people who speak only Spanish, you might decide to make two videos: one in English and one in Spanish.

Skills and Qualities Shared by Successful Workplace Communicators People who are good at communicating in the workplace share a number of skills and qualities. Four of them relate to the skills you have been honing in school and in college:

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r� Ability to perform research. Successful communicators know how to perform primary research (discovering new information through experiments, observations, interviews, surveys, and calculations) and secondary research (!nding existing information by reading what others have written or said). Successful communicators seek out information from people who use the products and services, not just from the manufacturers.

r� Ability to analyze information. Successful communicators know how to identify the best information—most accurate, relevant, recent, and unbiased—and then !gure out how it helps in understanding a problem and !nding ways to solve it.

r� Ability to solve problems. Successful communicators know how to break big problems into smaller ones, !gure out what isn’t working, and identify and assess options for solving the problems. They know how to compare and contrast the available options to achieve the clearest, most objective understanding of the situation.

r� Ability to speak and write clearly. Successful communicators know how to express themselves clearly and simply, both to audiences that know a lot about the subject and to audiences that do not. They take care to revise, edit, and proofread their documents so that the documents present accurate information, are easy to read, and make a professional impression. And they know how to produce different types of documents, from tweets to memos to presentations.

In addition to the skills just described, successful workplace communicators have seven qualities that relate to professional attitudes and work habits:

r� They are honest. Successful communicators tell the truth. They don’t promise what they know they can’t deliver, and they don’t bend facts. When they make mistakes, they admit them and work harder to solve the problem.

r� They are willing to learn. Successful communicators know that they don’t know everything—not about what they studied in college, what their company does, or how to write and speak. Every professional is a lifelong learner.

r� They display emotional intelligence. Because technical communication usually calls for collaboration, successful communicators understand their own emotions and those of others. Because they can read people— through body language, facial expression, gestures, and words—they can work effectively in teams.

r� They are generous. Successful communicators share information willingly. (Of course, they don’t share con!dential information, such as trade secrets, information about new products being developed, or personal information about colleagues.)

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r� They monitor the best information. Successful communicators seek out opinions from others in their organization and in their industry. They monitor the best blogs, discussion boards, and podcasts for new approaches that can spark their own ideas. They know how to use social media and can represent their organization online.

r� They are self-disciplined. Successful communicators are well organized and diligent. They know, for instance, that proofreading an important document might not be fun but is always essential. They know that when a colleague asks a simple technical question, answering the question today—or tomorrow at the latest—is more helpful than answering it in a couple of weeks. They !nish what they start, and they always do their best on any document, from the least important text message to the most important report.

r� They can prioritize and respond quickly. Successful communicators know that the world doesn’t always conform to their own schedules. Because social media never sleep, communicators sometimes need to put their current projects aside in order to respond immediately when a stakeholder reports a problem that needs prompt action or publishes inaccurate information that can hurt the organization.

How Communication Skills and Qualities A!ect Your Career Many college students believe that the most important courses they take are those in their major. Some biology majors think, for example, that if they just take that advanced course in genetic analysis, employers will con- clude that they are prepared to do more-advanced projects and therefore hire them.

Therefore, many college students are surprised to learn that what employ- ers say they are looking for in employees are the communication skills and qualities discussed in the previous section. Surveys over the past three or four decades have shown consistently that employers want people who can communicate. Look at it this way: when employers hire a biologist, they want a person who can communicate effectively about biology. When they hire a civil engineer, they want a person who can communicate about civil engineering.

A 2013 survey of 500 business executives found that almost half—44 percent—think that recent hires are weak in soft skills (including commu- nication and collaboration), whereas only 22 percent think recent hires are weak in technical skills (Adecco Staf!ng US, 2013). According to another 2013 survey, by the Workforce Solutions Group at St. Louis Community College, more than 60 percent of employers believe that job seekers are weak in com-

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