What’s technical about technical writing

Abstract

The definers of “technical writing” look at texts; the definers of “writing technically” look at the encounter which produces the texts. The aim of the method is straightforward: to find whatever is unique about the way the mind grapples with a technical subject and then converts that grappling into writing. A technical writer should render his own act of writing invisible because technical writing is communication, not self-expression, and the information itself is far more important than the writer’s attitude toward it. For J. S. Harris, technical writing is the rhetoric of the scientific method: Yet work in the history of science provides a fairly accurate distinction between scientific and technical writing. The modes of technical writing are concerned with the instrumental and contingent, those of science with the discursive and universal. Since they have different modes and make different claims, the yoking is very weak; the claim that the scientific method defines writing technically is simply cooptation.