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Creativity in technical communication

by Gloria McConnell, Rough Draft Managing Editor

Thank you, Dr. JoAnn Hackos. Well known in Society for Technical Communication circles for many years, Dr. Hackos is the president of Comtech Services, Inc. and director of the Center for Information-Development Management. A leader in the   management of information design and development, Dr. Hackos has made many contributions to our field. Most recently, she has given me a boost by supporting a position that I have held for many years.

Standards are not the enemy

I am sure that like me, most of you have pet peeves. They may be new or old. Dr. Hackos has recently addressed one of my long-standing pet peeves – the resistance by some writers to standards and structure in their technical documents. With the advent of XML, schemas, and structured content for content management systems, the situation has changed quite a bit since I first heard writers grumble about following a standard structure. The complaint is the same, however – that creativity is eliminated when a given structure is required.

One of my answers to these protests has been that technical writing is not creative writing (so get over it). Another, less sarcastic response has been to explain to disgruntled writers that by following a structured approach, they will be free to focus on the technical content, which can lead to more thorough, well-written, usable material. This is where creativity can shine in technical communication.

In her article, Structure is Not the Antithesis of Creativity, Dr. Hackos provides a nice discussion of the issue and supports this position. Thanks again, Dr. Hackos!

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 18th, 2009 at 8:00 am and is filed under March/April 2009 Issue, Rough Draft Newsletter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.