Thu Feb 29, 2024
So, after working as a Technical Writer for more than fifteen years, I decided it was time to change my job title. I pitched my case to Management, and they agreed. And thus, I am now an Information Developer. Some may claim that these two job titles are synonymous. But I don’t believe they are.
According to the surprisingly great Wikipedia entry on technical writing (although I shouldn’t be surprised it’s well written, given who is probably editing it), “technical writer” became an official job title during World War II.
It is no surprise that the profession of technical writing was established in the military and aerospace industries. When you marry a monolithic bureaucracy with products that are highly likely to kill you if you use them wrong, technical writing is the perfect love child.
But it’s been a while since World War II, where a Technical Writer furiously clacking away on her typewriter in some dark, locked-down war office would lose sleep at night because unclear instructions could mean the difference between life and death for soldiers on the battlefield.
The core focus for a Technical Writer hasn’t changed since then: take complex, jargon-littered information and simplify it for a non-technical audience. There’s nothing quite so gratifying as a well-written user manual.
But the 21st century has allowed Technical Writers to evolve beyond manuals… and even beyond technical writing itself. In fact, I see technical writing as just one of the many skills in an Information Developer’s toolbox. Technical writers are like translators, taking complex technical information and making it understandable for a specific audience. But Information Developers are more like architects, designing the entire information ecosystem, and not just focusing on specific content translation.
Designing the information ecosystem requires an analysis of the broader information needs of the organization you work for. It is a strategic analysis. An information strategy could begin by deciding, for example, whether specific information should be applied to a sales campaign or an intranet.
If the information is best applied to a sales campaign, then the conduit of information between Engineering and Sales does not necessarily result in a user manual. It could result in a LinkedIn landing page or a YouTube video. These are the sorts of decisions I find myself making these days. And with video post-production software - such as Premiere Pro - being more accessible than ever, developing these additional skills comes naturally to somebody who loves to learn new things - the hallmark of a successful Technical Writer.
Another example: Writing a Quick Start Guide for complex, modular systems with multiple products and multiple configurations is hard to do when the output is a static PDF. Interactive “choose your own adventure” websites are far more engaging, educational, and fun. Leaning into html and JavaScript coding is a rewarding way to expand as a developer and make your strategic vision happen. And taking a course or two on the more difficult back-end stuff is the kind of personal development that keeps your career interesting.
However, it is important to stress that the focus isn’t on getting lost in the code. The focus is on organizing and shaping the information to make it accessible to the user. Somewhat pretentiously, this focus is called Information Architecture in the tech-writing community. Information Architecture involves a deep understanding of the users, the content itself, and the context in which the content exists. It falls squarely into the realm of UX Design - enhancing usability so that the user is delighted rather than frustrated.
And far from eliminating our jobs, the rise of generative AI is a boon for the Information Developer. Text-to-speech voice generators have gotten so good that professional narration on YouTube videos is not only easy, it’s actually hard to tell it’s not a real person. The same goes with text-to-image generation. Oddly-specific illustrations are no longer a chore to create.
Text-to-video generators are catching up at an outstanding pace. The recent buzz over OpenAI’s Sora is not surprising - it really is mind-blowing stuff. If anything, I’m surprised the buzz hasn’t exploded into full-blown hype.
My latest obsession in the technical-writing arena is trying to find the perfect solution to sandboxing proprietary information and creating a non-hallucinating conversational chatbot trained on this data. I’m sure I’m not the only one. It feels like we’re going to get there really soon.
The future for Information Development is exciting. There will be opportunities to mold and shape information in Augmented Reality. Eventually, seamless information transfer may be possible through a neurological brain-to-computer interface. Just recently, Elon Musk’s Neuralink successfully implanted a chip into somebody’s brain, so this isn’t pure fantasy.
However, even though Content is King and Knowledge is Power, both Technical Writers and Information Developers have one thing in common: we’re the elves of the writing world - invisibly tinkering away in the background to make the user’s life - your life - better.
Kurt Vonnegut described technical writers as “…trained to reveal almost nothing about themselves in their writing. This makes them freaks in the world of writers, since almost all of the other ink-stained wretches in that world reveal a lot about themselves to the reader.”
So, all you beautiful technical-writing freaks out there - keep up the good fight. Even though you may not be saving soldier’s lives, you’re making a difference somewhere, somehow, by delivering the gift of knowledge in simple, clear, concise prose, in videos, in websites, and one day, directly into people’s minds.