Twitter - Can it Make You a Better Technical Writer?

Steve Pham — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 18:19:00 GMT

Copyblogger's Jennifer Blanchard thinks so and I completely agree. According to the post "How Twitter Makes You A Better Writer", Twitter helps writers in three ways:

Twitter forces you to be concise.
Twitter forces you to exercise your vocabulary.
Twitter forces you to improve your editing skills.

Being fairly new to Twitter, I find myself constantly editing my tweets (the Twitter word for posts) to fit the 140 character limit. Because of this limit, you do have to be careful about what and how you choose to write your messages.

How does Twitter force you to be concise?
There is no getting around being brief. You write more than 140 characters, your message doesn't get sent. You learn fast, capture the gist of what you want to say, and quickly send it out.

Why do you need to exercise your vocabulary?
If you only have 140 characters and have to be concise, you want to choose the most effective words to get your message across without using ones you don't. So you start thinking about ways to say what you want with creative word choice and not extra sentences. Each word matters. When each word matters you think about them a lot more.

What's editing have to do with anything?
Because of being concise and evaluating each word choice, you often have to re-read your messages quite frequently to evaluate whether it's what you meant to say. But, you don't have all day to edit a tweet. Twitter forces you to write better in shorter amounts of time because a medium like this is all about being timely. The posts need to be fast yet good. You can't compromise quality just because it's a microblog. And, you want to send out good content that relfects well on the rest of your content and your skills. Editing well and quickly is of essence.

So how does this help technical writers?
Well a good portion of help authoring is to deliver information as effectively and efficiently as possible so users can get back to the task they were trying to accomplish. Technical information isn't prose or poetry. No one wants to read a book on how to turn on the computer. A tool like Twitter can make you aware of how important each word choice is but it can also teach you to get your message across sooner. As well, I find it encourages creativity in being effective. Creativity is always an important tool in staying relevant in technical communication as well as learn how to meet your users' needs with less space and words. People want help with their problem now and then to move on. Twitter is great then for teaching technical writers to focus on one problem or message and quickly move onto the next task. What do you think? Do you agree? Or, do you think tools and mediums like Twitter are ruining the English language?

Lick the button

Lindsey Robbins — Fri, 09 May 2008 20:58:00 GMT

On our team, I’m still one of the newbies. Even though I’ve been in the technical communication field for 4+ years now, 2+ at Blackbaud, I’m surrounded by seasoned veterans who have geek speak coursing through their veins. It can be intimidating. I should feel like I’m past the rookie phase at least but it’s hard when I’m around other technical writers who can knock out a tough new feature in record breaking speed. Okay, maybe it’s not that dramatic but it can feel that way when I write, and rewrite, and rewrite some more because the language doesn’t sound right. Then, there are the times that no matter your best attempts at writing you make a silly little mistake that can produce really funny results. The most famous, not done by me though, is when someone wrote “click the button” but somehow missed the first c. I bet if we asked you to lick the button in a procedure you’d think twice about how effective that’d be to complete an import .

Last year, I did such a blunder in a piece of documentation I emailed to my team to review. Little did I know when I was copying and pasting that I didn’t get all of the “if” in “If you..” so inadvertently I would have completely offended all of you. Of course when my manager caught the error it made me gasp in horror. I was thankful we have processes in place for editing. Because even while I am a rookie, these types of mistakes can happen to anyone. We’re told repeatedly in school (at all levels) how important editing is and having a big blooper like that happen to me was a great lesson. You’re never too experienced to make a mistake and spell check won’t find everything. Make sure you take the time to have another pair of human eyes check your documents; it could potentially save you from some severe embarrassment.

Friendly Suggestion - Create an editing process in your organization so you know what you need to do with a document before you send it to your donors, important stakeholders, or the media. As my mother used to say… “Proper planning prevents poor performance.”

Do you have any funny examples of this happening to you?

From the Doc Side : editing

Twitter - Can it Make You a Better Technical Writer?

Lick the button