Contributed by Michael Harvey, Technical Writer, Publications

Having worked in the field of technical communication for over 20 years, I have given a lot of thought about what it takes to be a successful technical writer. It is as simple as the job title itself. You have to be “technical” and you have to be a “writer.”

To be “technical” means that you possess technical proficiency, and that requires technical curiosity. When you face an unfamiliar technical subject, you do not flinch from it; you want to understand it. When you read an unfamiliar technical term, you have a strong inclination to look it up.

Technical curiosity requires regular exercise. I use these exercises to keep my technical curiosity sharp.

• Drill down. I take an unfamiliar technical term and render it into something that I could explain to my neighbor. That means taking the definition of a term and translating all the terms within it into understandable words. For example, consider the term heteroscedasticity. Wikipedia provides the following definition: “In statistics, a sequence of random variables is heteroscedastic, or heteroskedastic, if the random variables have different variances.” OK, do I understand all the terms in that definition? I think that I understand the term “sequence,” but is its usage here specialized in some way? Do I understand what a “random variable” is, or what “variance” means? If not, I can look those terms up or follow hyperlinks to separate articles that explain them. I take all that I find to rewrite the definition of heteroscedasticity with less technical words. You can drill down into a term as deeply as you want. As a technical writer, you drill down as deeply as you need so that you can explain something clearly to your intended audience.
• Draw a picture. When someone starts to explain something complicated to me, I ask for a picture on my whiteboard. A single diagram can explain more about the relationship of the parts of a system than several pages of text can. If you have difficulty drawing a picture to explain an idea or a process to someone else, you might need to fill in the gaps in your understanding before you can effectively write about it.
• List the steps. A flow chart can make the steps of an unfamiliar procedure easier to follow. What happens first? What happens next? How does the outcome of one step influence or determine the next? When I draw such a chart, it often exposes gaps in what I know. If a question mark appears anywhere in a chart, it tells me that I might need to do some more research before writing further.
• Study existing pictures or drawings. When approaching a new subject, I find existing diagrams and drawings that illustrate its major points or basic principles. As many who work at SAS know, you can use graphical statistical methods to find structure in data or to check assumptions in statistical models. Regardless of the topic, you can use diagrams and drawings to discern and explore its fundamentals.

To be a “writer” means that you can communicate clearly to others. That is, you can muster an unruly pack of rough points into an orderly package of clear ideas. In my next post, I write more about what this means.