TWJ&W

Do we, as technical writers, tell the reader everything we know? Do we heck!

We most emphatically do not. And listing just the reasons why we do not would take a long time and a lot of words. That’s listing the reasons, not explaining any of them. But let’s talk about one of the reasons.

Readers are busy people. If they read the documentation at all, it’s usually because they were using the product to get something done, and hit a roadblock. They want to read just long enough to get unblocked.

Technical writers maintain samples of documents that they once created and add those sample documents to their professional portfolios. Even though I do not (repeat: not) have a portfolio for the sole purpose of employment, writing samples can be useful when seeking a new technical writing position.

Showing samples to prospective employers was always a grey area ethically. What we think of as samples are single copies of work to which we do not own the copyright. But allowing a prospective employer to examine these samples as part of an interview process is not worth anyone “lawyering up” over, especially since we as writers used to control access to the samples and since the duration of that access of yesteryear was enough for a quick perusal but not for any activity that would damage the copyright owner.

I spend most of my time at work thinking about the product users. Those are the people who will be reading what I wrote. That means I spend a lot of time considering what each person might not know, and might not know they don’t know. Part of the job of a technical writer is helping people learn. Which puts me in a very different head space than a lot of the people I work with.