One of the most effective ways of securing and sharing information is through writing. When the Early Man realized that speech is lost and memory fades, attempts were made to record thoughts, ideas, memory and most importantly knowledge and instructions, through the mode of writing. From the Stone Age to the Space Age, from pictographic depictions to the evolution of the language and the alphabet, human progression has been primarily defined by the success and evolving complexity of his ability to communicate and to share knowledge.
While cavemen inscriptions are the earliest attempts at instructional communication, in deserts west of the Nile, Egyptologists have found limestone inscriptions that they say are the earliest known examples of alphabetic writing. From symbols to alphabets, historians have charted the growth of the written word to Ancient Greece and Egypt, but Ancient India has also not been left behind. Epics like the Mahabharata refer to, describe and explain about Vimanas or ancient aeronautical devices, and ballistic weaponry. It is believed that The Indian Emperor Ashoka started a “Secret Society of the Nine Unknown Men” – great Indian scientists who were supposed to catalogue the many sciences.
The first great English poet, Geoffrey Chaucer’s work “A Treatise on the Astrolabe” despite its medieval roots, used deliberate organization and thorough content, along with a simple style and personable tone, to create a quintessential sample for technical documentation. ” The Treatise still serves as a model for incorporating coherent organization, appropriate content, accurate and precise descriptions, personable tone, effective metadiscourse, and varied sentence structure and length in modern technical writing.” The scribbling, drawings, and notes that accompanied the inventions and theories of Copernicus, Hippocrates, Newton and Leonardo da Vinci are in fact examples of technical documentation.
A clear trend towards the emergence of technical writing as professional field can be seen during the World War I (1914-1918) – and later during World War II (1939-1945) – when there was a growing need for technology-based documentation in the military, manufacturing, electronic and aerospace industries. Needless to say, the golden age of technical writing started with the invention of the computer and the internet. Joseph D. Chapline is considered to be the first technical writer to introduce software documentation to the rest of the world. Early in the 1940s, while working for Eckert and Mauchley, he became the first technical writer employed to document the way an operating system worked. He first wrote the Binac Computer User Guide (1949) and later an eight-page pamphlet called Technical Writing (1950).
In 1953, two organizations concerned with improving the practice of technical communication were founded on the East Coast of the United States: the Society of Technical Writers, and the Association of Technical Writers and Editors. These organizations merged in 1957 to form the Society of Technical Writers and Editors, a predecessor of the current Society for Technical Communication (STC). Today, STC is a global organization with many regional chapters, including STC India.
By 1960, the continued growth of technology, particularly in the electronics, aeronautics and space industries, nuclear and medical discoveries, created a big upsurge in demand for technical writers. During the sixties and seventies, numerous publications appeared in which their main concern was technical writing, and including journals such as the Journal of Technical Writing and Communication with its first issue in 1971, all of which have provided information to professionals on writing for technical purposes.
The 20th century is the age of structured authoring and optimizing information reuse. Interactive media, content and learning management systems, authoring tools, and the need for diverse and multi-output documentation to support the upsurge in application development, as well in consumer-focused mechanizations, have given end-user based technical documentation a professional status. The proliferation of social media and learning communities, and the continuous expansion of the blogosphere have opened avenues for more and more writers to connect, share, learn and talk.
In modern terms, many writers believe that technical communication is an evolved state of journalism, backed by the power of online and new publishing media. To quote from the blog by Anne Gentle, a senior technical writer at Advanced Solutions International. “After all, in software, technical writers are like the journalist is – finding the relevant story for a particular audience, interviewing to get the facts, presenting in a fair, nonjudgmental manner, and writing to a deadline.” And I believe this is what defines the future of technical communication.
As writers, it’s our responsibility to help customers connect with other customers to share and learn from experiences is a critical criteria for companies to make effective use of social media to drive customer acquisition. The modern day technical writer is part writer, part community manager, and part user experience advocate for their products, leveraging the benefits of social media, portals, blogs, and wikis. The art and science of technical communication has evolved; it is now time for the writer to evolve and adapt to the new demands of end-users, craving for better, easily-accessible, crispier and worthwhile information.
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