Three things any non-fiction writer can learn from technical writing
Technical writing. When you think of it, you probably envision thick manuals filled with pages and pages of long paragraphs. Dry and boring prose that no one wants to read, but which some poor soul had to write. As someone who does a lot of technical writing, I have to admit that there are more cases of that than I care to count.
That said, at its best technical writing can be concise, informative, and even interesting. While you probably won’t read a piece of documentation from end to end, a well-written manual or help file will retain your attention and teach you something. Sounds like good non-fiction in general, doesn’t it?
Believe it or not, there are a few things that you can learn from technical writing about penning non fiction. Here are three that I find to be the most useful.
Write tightly
I know, I know. I hammer this one to death. When it’s done well, technical writing is as tight as a well-written newspaper article or radio report. The characteristics of really good technical writing include:
- Using the minimum number of words to convey an idea or concept
- Making sure the wording that you use is natural — avoid jargon and mangled writing like based on system status
- Keep the writing active
- Use bullets where and when needed
Of those points, I think the second one is the most important. No one wants to read a dry, dull academic or technical tract. Write as you speak.
Research, research
Technical writers do a lot of research. Reading documents, talking with experts like programmers and project managers, working with hardware and software. There’s usually a lot of information to plow through, assimilate, and to distill.
The key is to have an effective research strategy. Before approaching a human being, I gather as much background information as I can. From there, I strip out what I think is superfluous or, at least, mark it as being questionable for my purposes. Then, I start pestering my sources. They answer my questions, fill in any blanks that I might have, and even point me in new directions.
The research often has to be done quickly, and you really need to focus your questions for the experts. Why? Most of them can’t set aside an hour to sit and talk with you — in many cases, you’re lucky to get 15 minutes or half an hour.
And you learn to use email and tools like wikis to help with your research. A concise email message or a wiki page for questions and answers gives your sources a chance to think through their answers and to tackle your questions as time permits. You might get the answers piecemeal, but you’ll get them.
Topic-based writing
A hot topic among technical writers is something called topic-based writing (I refuse to call it authoring, as others in the profession do). In this context, a topic is a self-contained piece of information. It can be a procedure or a section made up of a couple of paragraphs. But it isn’t explicitly connected to, nor does it rely on, any previous or subsequent topic. The strength of topic-based writing is that you can create a large amount of information that you can reuse or combine in a number of ways.
This approach is good for articles or essays that are side projects. You can write a chunk or section here and there, then later pull them all together into a whole. It’s also useful when you’re collaborating on a project with one or more other writers. You don’t need to worry (at least, not too much) how everything fits together while you’re writing.
The biggest problem with topic-based writing, at least as far as documentation goes, is when you stitch topics together the result seems a bit disjointed. There doesn’t seem to be a true flow, inasmuch as documentation flows. You can get around this when writing other forms of non-fiction by adding linking material or a simple segue sentence or two.
Thoughts? Feel free to leave a comment.
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