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Technical communication

From Biocrawler, the free encyclopedia.

Technical communication is the process of conveying information about technology to an intended audience. A technical communicator is a person whose job involves technical communication. Technical communication jobs include the following:

The technology can be of any kind, including the sciences, high technology including computers and software, consumer electronics, product user guides and even business policies and procedures.

Contents

1 Document creation

1.1 Style
1.2 Format

1.2.1 Text
1.2.2 Figures

2 External links

3 See also

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Document creation

Chiefly important in technical communication is the formatting and composition of the written document. The paramount goal of technical communication is clarity, reducing every expression to only its essential meaning.

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Style

More than general writing, technical communication features judicious conceptual simplifications.

Intensifiers are omitted.

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Format

Throughout all aspects of technical communication, formatting is kept to a minimum. No two formatting elements may share a cause; every choice of font, color, position etc. must exist to distinguish some unique meaning. Extraneous formatting distracts, and strays from the writer's goal, clarity.

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Text

Formatting text involves typographical adjustment and document organization.

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Figures

Figures both help clarify explanations and amuse the reader visually. These may include pictures of any type, tables, equations or graphs. Generally, only the important part of a figure is displayed. This may mean cropping a picture, trimming a table or magnifying part of a graph. Done properly, such modifications reduce visual activity and direct the reader to the information that matters.

Pictures are usually restricted to line diagrams, with no color fills unless they bear meaning. A line drawing of a map may contain color fills to distinguish between bodies of water, but squares with identical labels in a flowchart would not feature varied fills, lest they imply some difference in the squares' meanings.

Tables are kept clean. As with pictures, table cell fills are forbidden unless they have meaning. Borders are always stripped to those necessary; usually only that between the header and data is kept, though even that may be removed if the header text is bold. (Having both a border and bold text redundantly expresses the superiority of the header.)

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