I have been writing technical white papers, training documents and on-line help for over 25 years now. At the beginning, I was a programmer who had a facility for writing and telling people, in words they could understand, how to use the software they were expected to learn. What I want to know is, “How the market shifted from an emphasis on communication and letting people how to do what they need to do, to an emphasis on technical knowledge?”
One of the major trends I have I have noticed over the years, is that writing is a commodity that is not valued. I don’t know how things got to be this way, but I have some guesses.
1.
Self Publishing on the internet can be done by anyone.
This leads people to believe if I create it, I can tell people about it “anyone can write.” If anyone can write,
value shifts from writing skills to technical knowledge. While many people can
fake or claim writing ability, they can’t do so with technical knowledge.
2.
We’re so used to seeing poor writing—especially on the
internet, in everything from blogs to magazines to help manuals and more….the
general standard for what passes as publishable has dipped far enough that now
anyone who can type, can write. Again, the Internet here is a reason for the
transformation. Taking this into consideration, many educational institutions
have added a technical writing course for their technical graduates (just as in
the past, where one had to have a basic Writing course in in other subjects).
Just because one has taken a technical writing course, does not mean, they know
how to communicate a complex subject.
3.
A third reason why people have come to value the
technical more is because the world has become much more technical, and the
level of knowledge has become highly specialized. One doesn’t merely know how
to program. Today there are more than a dozen programming languages to know —
PHP, C#, C++, Fortran, Java, .NET, Ruby, Python, Perl, Javascript, and more.
And it’s not just programming, but every IT field has followed similar trends.
4.
Proliferation of Technical Writing/Training
Degrees/Educational Institution Designations. Those in mainstream
post-secondary education are going to disagree with me on this. Colleges and
Universities have come from a system where rapid change does not happen. Because
curriculum takes so long to develop and the amount of money invested in
developing it is significant, they cannot keep up to rapid changes that happen
in the writing and teaching about Computer Software industry. Instructors can
only teach the basics of how people learn, how they assimilate knowledge. The
tools the students learn to use and the software and programming languages they
learn to write about change significantly each year.
To help mitigate all this complexity, programmers created some writing tools that are what they call “Single Sourcing”. Single Sourcing are content management systems created to allow the
same source content to be used multiple ways to create better documentation. The
benefits of single source publishing are better for the editor rather than the
user, If the editor is not skilled, the content is most often virtually useless
to an unskilled end user. However, technical users, those familiar with what is
to be done (and often the testers of the documentation) do not notice this!
What may seem inherently obvious (to the skilled user) is totally neglected. Further, In the field of technical help authoring, writing is not the only skill. There are more than dozen tools and technologies to know — Flare, RoboHelp, Author-it, DITA, SharePoint, XMetal, Captivate, Camtasia, XML, CSS, HTML, InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, Flash, and so on. Each year, there are more and more entries. When I started there were 4 main softwares, NONE of which are still being used (except Snagit).
When you combine the ability to use the writing/authoring tools with the technical software creation tools, with technical programming (or usage) skills, with an ability to communicate the “how” to the end user--you can easily see the basic law of supply and demand causes the market to place higher value on technical knowledge.
No wonder so many people don’t like using complex software!
