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What Is Technical Communication?

Technical information is frequently communicated through documents, such as proposals, emails, reports, podcasts, computer help files, blogs, and wikis. Although these documents are a key component of technical communication, 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.

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 talk about it, 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 speaking with his colleagues in the company and outside of it, and then reading discussion 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 schedule 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 findings: the company needs to make some changes to the IT infrastructure and invest in some new software to combat this serious security threat. She decides to meet with her own colleagues to see if they agree with her. She points them to the report on the company network and sets up a meeting for later that week.

In short, when you produce technical communication you use the four basic communication skills—listening, speaking, reading, and writing—to analyze a problem, find and evaluate evidence, and draw conclusions. These are the same skills and processes you use when you write in college, 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 technical 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 work-related tasks.

For example, suppose you are a public-health scientist working for a federal agency. You and your colleagues just completed a study showing that, for most adults, moderate exercise provides as much health benefit as strenuous exercise. After participating in numerous meetings with your colleagues and after drafting, critiquing, and revising many drafts, you produce four different documents:

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