What is Technical Communication?

Technical communication is a long, difficult process that a technical communicator must go through to help clarify and explain complex material to nontechnical audiences. It is a writing process that can be difficult to define because the world is constantly changing with advancements in technology. According to Frederick M. O’Hara, Jr. in his article, A Brief History of Technical Communication, technical communication has seen drastic transformations from its early history until now, and there is belief that there will be quick changes in this profession in the near future (O’Hara 4). I think the hard part of defining technical communication is not figuring out what is technical communication, but it is figuring out what it is not. As stated by Jo Allen in The Case Against Defining Technical Communication, deciding what is and what is not technical communication can be challenging because “definitions draw lines: This is and that isn’t”(Allen 74). This statement is important because by defining technical communication, there is always the possibility of something getting excluded from the definition like cookbooks. Before reading the articles by O’Hara and Allen, I thought technical communication had an unchanging, specific definition with a relatively young history. After reading through the article by Allen, I agree with Allen when he states at the end of his article that he thinks “the definition will not be a handy one- or two-sentence catch-all” (Allen 75). This statement by Allen is important because there are many aspects of technical communication that I have not thought of before like clarity and style, and all of these aspects play important roles in technical communication. I think since there are so many different components of technical communication, there is going to be a lot of disagreement about what is classified as technical writing. If technical communicators can start agreeing on what is not technical communication, then I think it might be easier to define what technical communication actually is. Jo Allen argues in his article that the challenge of defining technical communication is that previous definitions focus “on a single aspect of technical writing, using this aspect as the basis for distinguishing technical writing from all other genres of writing” (Allen 69).  There is no one correct way to define technical communication. It is a special type of writing with its own special process, but it is a process that is continually changing and adapting to new technologies. Technical communication has no clear cut definition, but if I were to try to define it, I would define it as a creative process that constantly changes. This process is used to help explain a complex world, and the process is used to transform this technical language into nontechnical language. Based on my definition, some examples of technical communication might be car repair manuals, user manuals for electronics, reference guides, and online help files.