Why should you write clearly?

Writing clearly is the hallmark of communicating effectively. Most often we write and believe that what we have written is clear to others. However, many a times it is not. Our writing in general than its clarity overwhelms us. But if we still believe that what we write is readable and understandable to the larger audience then its time we look at other's writing and analyze where we are placed in terms of clarity in our own writings. In fact, when we look around the people who make the difference, are the one who communicate their ideas clearly and forcefully, both orally and in writing.

Success eludes those who can't express their ideas, or who do so in bureaucratic fashion. Today, its not just enough to be a good scientist, engineer, businessman, or whatever you do. You have to be able to make other people understand what you're doing and why it is important. No matter how competent you may seem in private, your hard work will usually go unrecognized, because others will step in and communicate it more skillfully.

Be with the information explosion

Undoubtedly, today the fastest growing segment of any nation’s economy is information industry, which is by and large, production and dissemination of information. It is rapidly surpassing the mark of production of goods and services. The obvious reason is that the sizes of corporations and government agencies have grown so large that transmitting information through personal contact is merely impossible. In today’s world, clear, concise and to the point writing has greater relevance than ever before. One could get away with disorganized report, ambiguous memos a couple of decades back when people had more time and things moved slowly. But today we are competing with thousand of other people at a time who are sending multiple electronic documents through e-mails. People will not be interested in your writing if it does not convey the central idea in more than a minute.

The important skill

Nine out of ten times when the corporate executives are asked how the business and engineering schools could better equip the students to face the challenges of the real business world. The responses have been unanimously emphasizing to train the students to write better and clear English. However, it is really unfortunate that the education systems do not teach you the skills, which you require to use everyday i.e. to write.

Communication skills are highly rewarded in business, industry, and the scientific community today. If you are able to get messages down on paper clearly and condense masses of data to one sheet of clear analysis, your future in your organization is really bright. Truth is also that a huge amount of money gets wasted every year on research and technical achievements because the reports and memo fails to inform the result concisely. You might wonder that if the system is running on the wrong machine how can you make the difference in totality. But, the message is, you can do something of your part. That will get you noticed and others will follow the example you set in.

Get recognized

The person who can clear the mess of written words will immediately attract attention. People who have never heard of you will recognize you by the word you spread around. You may be helpful to the people for making the language legible of the reports and memos, which are going to impact larger audience.

The danger of sloppy writing is that it can create unimaginable damage and destroy the image of you being a good writer. Even if you write a good piece of concept, idea or script and if it fails to covey its clear meaning, you earn a bad reputation. Next time your readers may find you a burden to read your write-up without really going through it. Your name might sound boring for your reader. Similarly, in the organization, where you work, you get branded as good writer or get compromised as a writer in die-hard requirement.

Always remember your writing can reach far more people than you can personally contact them. To them, you are precisely judged by your writing and that shows how effectively you communicate to them. In case your point of contact with your professional world is through your writing, then its even more tough challenge for you to create your image through your writing. To your audience, in true sense, your writing is you.

Your communication is important

Once Sir William Oslar wrote- "In science, the credit goes to the man who convinces the world, not to the man to whom the idea first occurs."

True, as it is said, scientific investigation or engineering project is never completed until you communicate your results. No matter how significant your findings are, they remain useless unless you communicate them in a way that others can understand. You might have worked long hours and hard way to develop some new ideas or products. When you finally succeeded, you decided that this might be something a lot of other people might find useful.

You excitedly write it up and share this announcing your new result. But you never got a response from them, neither critical statement nor the appreciation. You wonder why such things happen. The practical scenario is you put yourself in the receiver’s shoes and analyze your writings. As you analyze, you understand that where you had gone wrong.

Clear writing is clear thinking

Many a times while you sat down to produce a piece of writing you realized that you don’t understand the subject as you thought. You find yourself as if you have nothing to say in your writing and moreover, whatever you are writing is the information to cover up your ignorance. In reality, writing has a way to visualize your knowledge and uncover the gaps in your understanding. But if you consider that you have not produce a good piece of writing, you are probably missing the clear thought to write about.

Everyone has experienced the clarifying effects of getting something down on paper. The reason is simple. When you view something through several senses, you gain new perspectives from each one. Writing uses vision, touch and, if you read it to yourself, sound. Each sense enriches the experiences surrounding a concept that may have formerly been only vaguely specified somewhere inside your head.

If you're finding that your thinking about some idea is fuzzy and ill defined, try jotting your ideas down, in whatever form and order comes to mind. Look them over. Read them out loud. Write them out in different ways. Talk them over with friends and coworkers. You will soon find that you are thinking more clearly about them, too.

If you have been missing this aspect in your writing, you may re-look and take time to refine this art to suit your writing and redefine your prospect of being a good communicator. A good communicator will always be sought after in terms of demand in industry, education and any specific field of knowledge. Free advice is to hone this skill as soon as possible.

Technical Writers: Can you justify your job?

Technical writers are in the profession of disseminating the technical knowledge in structured format for the consumption of the user, which is aimed to realize a specific task or use. The present situation is, where the industry is filled with the technical writers who come from different backgrounds. Most of the technical writers are engineers, some of them have taken the technical writing course and some of them have made transition into this field from direct mass communication and journalism. The document produced by these technical writers has mixed quality as good, bad and ugly. However, most often the complaint received from the customer is that the documents are not user friendly.

If analyzed, most of the time the language is not very appropriate, clear and grammatically correct to explain the features and functionality. Some times the information presented does not have flow; sometimes many of the information are missing from the document. In nutshell we have not grown to a level to claim ourselves expert in the field of technical writing. One can say that this field is still in the nascent stage in India. Largely true, because our curriculum does not include this subject and we do not intend to take it as a career. Most of the people today who opt for writing career become journalists and join media related jobs.

The apathy is that most of the people who are today’s technical writers are not from the writing background, nor do they have inclination towards writing. It’s sheer job opportunity, which has drawn them to accept the job. Many of them working after a brief period have made a decision to shift to other fields and remaining are carrying on the task to continue their job. It’s quite ridiculing that the job what you do everyday is the job you do not like to do but you are bound to do because you are paid for that. Or, the job what you do is not your cup of tea. All these factors add to the immature technical writing produced by some of the unskilled technical writers, which brings bad name to the community.

The job what you hold today, is not just the job what you can hold because of the fact that you can write little bit of English. If you do not love your job then in fact it will not take you anywhere. You first be writer before you become a technical writer. As a matter of fact, you have to be first a writer to be a medical writer, political writer, and technical writer or fiction writer. If the writer is missing in you then nothing else can help you to become technical writer. Therefore, not only writing, but good quality writing is desired to be in this profession.

Can transition add value?

For many of the aspiring creative writer working as a technical writer might seem a good option because it is going to be paid well. If you are transitioning from your current non-writing position to technical writing because it's a hot market, you like technology, and/or you want to do away with your freelance tag, perhaps you are thinking right. But in case you just like writing, then you should think before you step in.

Writing and editing user manuals, help documents, technical bulletin and API document could be painful if you don’t love doing so. Technical writing is demanding and you will be tried writing different sort of technical stuff, which might not satisfy your liking for writing what you are looking for. So, before deciding to choose a career into technical writing, you must evaluate yourself.

Some would prefer to go for highly satisfying writing career of their liking even if it pays them less. Some would love to write about technology and enjoy doing so. Some would find technical writing as boring and unimaginative. Some would find technical writing as very interesting and creative, as it relates to problem solving and that requires lot of creativity. Follow your instinct to know where you fall among these categories.

What the technical writers meet and seminars stress upon?

Added to that the seminar and meet organized for the technical writers stresses upon learning different kinds of authoring and word processing tools, which is any way technical writers have to know to perform the task. I don’t know if any of the meet stresses to shape good language in spite of knowing that most of the technical writers come from non-writing background and that is going to be the bottleneck problem as they grow in their career. It is assumed that technical writers are basically the writers who has all the language ingredient in them to produced good writing and it’s the technical knowledge what they lack. Fundamentally, the assumption is right in the sense that you know what is expected out of you in terms of job and aim of the meet is to update you with new knowledge of the industry. Otherwise also, it’s the personal responsibility of the person to shape up their language skill who opts for this career.

Promise of global business

The reflection of good writing can be a visual part in any form, be it script, an article, an essay, an advertisement or a user manual. Especially user manual is supposed to be a first date with the product. Great manuals can sell products. There are good tutorials, which can make you understand the product so well that time and again you would love to continue with the same products.

But still there will be people who would still persist in search of your inner beauty. However, this is not the way to bet. Microsoft has consistently been trying to address everyone’s questions to make it competitive and have advantages. Still they may have messages. Above all to write the good manual you need to have good writers. And if you don’t have good writers your documents will not serve the purpose to the user. Bad documentation increases the cost of technical support and earns you even bad reputation in the industry.

Can we rise to the occasion and face the reality?

The best technical communicator is a technical person, is a subjective issue to argue. However, technical writers are the writers who have the rare ability to communicate and teach through indirect means such as paper and online media.

But it is very difficult to merely narrate a profession, which is entirely dependant on the personal caliber of a person. It is really a tough question to ask who can make a good technical writer. Many good writers who are able to write good story, poetry and fiction have many a times proved to be good technical writers as well and at a time bad writer too. Its all dependant on the personal interest what you could make of yourself

Possible solution?

Probably possible solution to stabilize this field in today’s context would be to hire really good writers so that they can justify their presence in the job. For the technical writers also, it would be apt to get out of the tag of half-writer, pseudo writer or be in dual job capacity being a writer and someone else too. If this field is to sustain well in India, the quality of writing has to be improved immensely to meet the challenge.