This week the much-maligned STC tries to define what it means to be a technical communicator.

Actually the STC are at pains to point out that the “thoughts expressed in this post are not the official opinion of the Society for Technical Communication or its Board of Directors, but rather only of the individual.”

Seems a bit lame to me, to be honest. I have to say I never bought into the job title and never been offered or seen job advertised for Technical Communicators. “You’re a what?” “But we need a Technical Writer.”

Ok, with that aside, Micheal Hughes makes feels that “It’s bad enough that I periodically go through my own identity crises; it seems I’ve chosen a profession that collectively does the same.”

His point is valid and it’s worth discussing. He asks what are those common attributes that equate medical writers, software documentation specialists, and all the other variations of our profession?

Here is his list of what technical communicators do:

1. User Analysis. Define the users of the documentation and analyze the tasks that the documentation must support.

2. Document Design. Plan documentation deliverables to support those tasks. Design the organization, presentation, and technical architecture (where appropriate) for each deliverable.

3. Project Management. Plan the documentation schedule (i.e. Documentation Plan – Ivan) and monitor project process against that schedule.

4. Content creation. Create new content or modify existing content that tells the audience something useful and actionable.

5. Delivery. Build appropriate outputs, such as Help, web pages, manuals, and training, and promote those builds to the appropriate distribution channels.

6. Quality Assurance. Assess documentation for accuracy, adequacy, accessibility, and usability.

He add that “our quality assurance is communication centric: are words spelled correctly, can sight-impaired users access the information in this Help topic, do the users make sense of this explanation in a way that moves them toward successfully meeting their goals?

I’m not sure I see it this way.

Technical writers, sorry technical communicators, may perform these tasks but some of these (to me) belong to other depts, such as QA and the Usability group.

Technical communicators may perform these tasks but that’s what they’re there for.

They’re there to produce information of a technical nature  – not to write test scripts, debug or check the user interface.

My reading of this is that after X number of years it seems the STC still hasn’t defined what it members actually do.

Shouldn’t it have move on to other areas by now?

Maybe the confusion that surrounds the STC is it’s inability to define who it serves. Reading this list strikes me that the organization is still on the ‘ground floor’; if this definition hasn’t been nailed down, how can you do anything else?

Likewise, I find it hard to envisage other user groups, such as designers, architects, actors, doctors having the same dilemma.

Maybe the STC is trying to drum up support and be more inclusive.

He closes by saying that “if we are going to move forward as a profession, we need to focus on our sameness for awhile, not our diversity. We need to periodically reaffirm that we are one profession.”

What’s your take on this?

Is this an accurate description of you, the Technical Communicator? What you would suggest needs to be changed?

PS – over at IBM, they stopped using the term Technical Writer. Instead they called us Information Developers. Does this make more sense? You develop information.

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