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What is essential about technical communication? What core competencies define us and differentiate us from other pro
fessions? As the Society for Technical Communication pre
pares to celebrate its Golden Anniversary next year, I think that it's appropriate to ask these questions and attempt to answer them, both for ourselves and for those who ask us what it means to be a technical communicator.
CREATING AND MANAGING KNOWLEDGE
We technical communicators often assume that we are not members of the group that we call subject matter experts. I'm not sure why we make that assumption. Whatever the reason, many of us seem to be content to know only enough about the technical subject do main we work in to be able to translate information provided by subject matter experts into language understandable by nonexpert audiences.
This trend is directly connected to the growth of technical communication as a profession and can be traced to at least three developments in technology during the past 60 years:
Increasingly sophisticated military armaments and equipment
The expansion and development of air travel
The proliferation of consumer electronics products
In each case, complex technologies required technical documents for vast audiences of nonexpertsenlisted personnel in the military, aviation mechanics and technicians, and the general public. When it became apparent that scientists, engineers, and programmers didn't communicate effectively with these lay audiences, companies in these lines of business began to recruit and hire people with communication expertise to do the job. Thus, technical communication evolved into a fulltime profession, not simply a task that technical people occasionally performed as part of their job responsibilities.
The age of the naive user, however, has almost certainly peaked, and we must learn to cope with the consequences. To survive as a profession, technical communicators must be more than packagers of information for the technically uninitiated. We must become masters of the domains in which we work.
Although software user interfaces, for example, are far from perfect, they are significantly better than they were just 10 years ago. As a result, many fewer users need the kind of handholding...