Technical Writer Poll: Replacing “Traditional” Technical Communications

The interesting thing about the list of alternatives is that none of them are new. All these things have existed for years. It is precisely because they are not new, but now represent the mainstream, that they present a challenge to traditional tech pubs.

Actually, though, reading documentation has always taken a back seat to asking another person for help. What the Web has done, in connecting us all together, is to make asking another person much easier and much more effective, with the result that there is correspondingly less need to refer to the documentation set. And once the usage of any resource drops below a certain threshold, it becomes burdensome to the user, something they no longer feel they should have to do.

All that said, I think there are two things that technical communicators should be thinking about beyond a change in media:

1. The change in time frame. The notion of a documentation set as something fixed that is released in sync with a product is out of date. Products themselves no longer work that way, as it becomes the norm for software to update itself automatically over the network. Technical communication responsibilities no longer end on the release day.

2. The change in face. Traditional tech pubs have been written to present a generic corporate face. The tech writer was never a personality to the reader. The trustworthiness of the content was established by the professionalism of the corporate presentation. Today, trust is becoming increasingly social and personal. People trust people more than corporations. Knowledge and community respect trump professional presentation. Saying the technical communication is going social is not about media, it is about face — the shift from the corporate face to the personal face.

Mark, I thoroughly agree, and your insightful comments tie back to a comment made by Cheryl regarding the fact that the personality types that make good technical communicators have changed from the old stereotypes. Business and social savvy are now required skills in this field, and we probably need to focus more on soft skill development than we have in past.

The shift to the personal face should make the whole field more appealing to the younger generation–we hope!

[…] a flurry of debate on “documentation going away” got started. So we took up the debate with a TechWhirl poll question: If traditional documentation “goes away,” what new tech comm me… As the debate continues, it’s clear that technical writing delivery mechanisms, and perhaps even […]