Technical Writing

Hi everyone! How technical can you be with creative content? This is a good question. Let’s start by looking at how we can define a technical writer.

A technical writer is an organized communicator for a company. They present the company in specific ways and focus on areas that require clear and succinct communication. They also work on creating and formatting material effectively to increase overall communication efficacy.

A technical writer for a communications company would be responsible for the below (and later on can assist with other areas like research, project management and customer advocacy):

• Creating/formatting proprietary documents (i.e.: emails, meeting minutes, customer welcome packages, social media posts, blog and website content etc.)
• Developing instructions, guidelines, training material, strategies and plans
• Creating templates, marketing collateral, brochures, promotional materials, ad copy and presentations

Higher-level roles:

• Writing contracts, proposals, RFPs, white papers, reports, feasibility studies and reviews
• Acting as an interviewer, trainer, organizer, facilitator or mediator
• Designing visual communication strategy, information graphics and/or data interpretation

Another advanced role is analytics (excerpt from Wikipedia):

The use of computer skills, mathematics and statistics, combined with descriptive techniques and predictive models to GAIN valuable knowledge from data. The discovery, interpretation, and communication of meaningful patterns in data; and the process of applying those patterns towards effective decision-making.

In other words, analytics can be understood as the connective tissue between data and effective decision-making, within an organization. A technical writer also observes and collects data from customers that suggests the product and/or customer experience can be changed or improved in a way that customers would prefer or benefit from.

So, technical writing can be used to enhance communication to a specific audience and can create simplicity from abstract or conceptual ideas. These specifications can improve user experience, time management, levels of customer satisfaction and other customer-centered metrics. 

Desirable traits of a technical writer: 

• organized and able to optimize process
• detailed and extremely focused
• able to portray different styles and perspectives 
• a leader and team motivator
• easygoing and confident personality
• insightful, intelligent and innovative
• transparent, accurate and responsible

Blox. Communications would like to define technical writing as it specifically relates to creative entities. What traits (quality) and aspects (quantity) do you think would be important to operating a technical creative company?