...some useful lessons from the past

Winsor’s 1994 article on invention in technical communication could have been written today, in 2011: nothing has changed!  Like Winsor, I sometimes have the opportunity to observe the interaction between engineers and technical communicators (and I deliberately use the modern technical communicator in place of the legacy technical writer, with its negative connotation, here). The writing up of technical work that Winsor reports as a final step of the process is still the norm…knowledge creation is certainly separate from “its formulation in words”.  The writing task unfortunately records the knowledge and doesn’t create it. What is different, though, are the recording tools that are available to us today.  These include:

• Shouldn’t it be the goal of all educated people to communicate effectively with their audience? 
• Isn’t some information lost when translated from subject matter expert to technical communicator?

With these recording tools, the specialized role of technical communicator is expanded to include any who invent technical content.  I personally do not believe that you can separate “writing” from “invention”…all subject matter experts should be able to articulate and communicate their thoughts, not just technical communications.  Surely, some subject matter experts are less skilled in doing so than others…and for them, the recording tools are a godsend, for they no longer have to rely on the “technical communicator” middleman.

Before I get vilified for denigrating our technical communication profession and stating my non-politically correct opinion, let me offer these points in my defense for your consideration:

• Social media tools such as wikis, blogs, and SharePoint sites (in corporate environments), and 
• Content creation tools such as more powerful and intuitive word processors (e.g. Word, Pages), thought capture software (e.g. Comapping, BizAgi), etc.

If these points are true, then it logically follows that subject matter experts should be ultimately responsible for invention and recording of their desired communication. My opinion is actually a utopian one: everyone, no matter their subject matter expertise, should be an effective communicator.  Today, with the tools at our disposal, and innovative instruction, there should be no excuse that the basic skill of communication is not mastered.

Winsor also posited that “writing might sometimes have a negative impact on thought”.  In this, as well, I agree with her.  Let me share an example, similar to the qualitative analysis of note taking reported in her article.  Writer A on a technical communication writing team I led would diligently attempt to write down everything that was discussed at the first stage planning meeting (where the direction is decided). Concentrated on capturing absolutely everything that was discussed at the meeting, for fear of missing something important, Writer A either missed key business decisions or spent several hours trying to re-create his notes.  Writer B, on the other hand, made very few notes.  In fact, Writer B would sum up the business direction in a 15 word “elevator speech”.  The output from Writer B was near-perfect text from the first and the output from Writer A, the opposite. In this case, Writer B was certainly more successful because he listened and tried to understand, at a high level, the business direction for the proposal.  For him, it was easy to drill down into the “trees” once he understood where he was going.  In the meantime, Writer A was often so inundated with information he could not see the “forest”.

What I find painful is the slow rate of change in how writing and communication are perceived.  Winsor wrote her article 17 years ago in 1994, and in it reflected on 20 years’ prior research on the writing process.  Today, writing is still recursive.  Perhaps, though, as teachers of the next generation of communicators, we should encourage “generating knowledge in order to produce prose” instead of “generating knowledge as a result of producing prose”.