Download PDF
Contents
Findings and Discussion
We report here on several of the themes that emerged from interviews. Along with the findings, we include ideas about what these findings mean and how we can interpret some of what we learned from interviewing these technical writers. The themes we present in this section are ethics, adaptation, value, community, and work techniques. All of these themes reveal how interested technical writers in the New Zealand and Australian region are in working to be inclusive, community-oriented, and aware of user needs.
Ethics
Ethics play a significant role in how the technical communicators we interviewed defined their work, and ethics is an overarching concern of the field in general (Dragga, 1997; Dombrowski, 2000; Colton, Holmes, & Walwema, 2017). Many of the interviewees brought up the topic of inclusive language as an ethical consideration for technical writers. Interviewee Natalie explained, “inclusive language is certainly a hot topic, so part of that [is] keeping up with what’s happening in that on a global scale, like Twitter and Microsoft; they’ve got a whole list of words, like, ‘Hey, we’re not going to use these words anymore.’” Some of those words include phrases like “hey guys,” or “hey girls,” which interviewee Rachel said are prohibited within her company group chat. Within her organization, interviewee Ally explained that they include their gender pronouns on email signatures. Another technical communicator, Wendy, tries to avoid gender-specific wording. She said, “you might find that it’s unique to see ‘he or she’” in her writing.
Being inclusive requires awareness, and many of the writers we interviewed noted this. When interviewee Lilly spoke about inclusivity, she recognized her own privilege of being a technical communicator who speaks English. She said, “It’s easier for me to find a job. I also have an English-sounding name so people assume that I can speak English and write it. In that sense, I feel privileged.” Similarly, interviewee Jennifer addressed her own privilege, recognizing that she is of a small percentage of minorities employed at her organization, and feels “privileged to be a part of this organization.” Recognizing diversity was part of this awareness. Writers explained how they tried to be inclusive toward minorities, and many stated an awareness of the different ethnicities in the region and a commitment to write with a diverse audience in mind. Some pointed out that they run into issues when translating their documentation into different languages, but that this is a necessary project when practicing inclusivity.
Other technical writers stated that inclusivity within their organizations means organizing, such as weekly get-togethers. This is an extension of awareness; it means that organizations and writers are consciously educating themselves and others about what it means to be inclusive. For example, Natalie’s organization “formed an equality and inclusion council in the last year,” which she participates in. She said this allows her to feel aware of the issues ongoing within her organization. The equality and inclusion council has allowed her company to “put together a set of required changes to wording through the software.” Additionally, she mentioned inclusivity being part of employee training: “everybody in the company gets training a little bit on equality and inclusion and on integrity and what the core values of the company are.” Sophia, a technical writer in Australia, said she participated in a group at work to “raise awareness into the lack of diversity and [to] go against discrimination.” Groups like these are necessary; Sophia shared a story about a coworker who confided in her (as a result of their connection through the group) that she had been sexually harassed at work. Without revealing the name of the person who told her, Sophia brought the information to her boss.
Along with inclusivity, being accurate is an ethical consideration for these technical writers. Denise, a writer in New Zealand, brought this up because her work involves reporting COVID-19 statistics for the government; such information may be used to inform the public and policymakers. She explained, “I have to state only facts, not make any assumptions, even if I think that ‘Oh, this could be the thing.’ I just can’t do that.” Michael, a content developer in New Zealand who works with medical documentation, echoed Denise’s sentiment, saying that the information he writes is directly related to the safety of end users. He said, “Because it’s medical pages, we want the information to be safe and the best we can, because if you make mistakes with accuracy, then someone’s life can be at risk.” Lilly also focused on truth as one of her ethical considerations. “Part of the reason I like it as opposed to corporate communication is that I feel that technical writing is factual, and in [public relations] you sometimes have to tell it how the boss would like to hear it. You can’t lie when documenting a product.” She prefers to work in TPC because it allows her to enact this ethical consideration of truth, which is part of her core beliefs.
Participants brought up a number of additional ethical considerations. Several mentioned the importance of considering the end user as they complete their work. “I champion the worker,” said Jolene, a technical communicator in Australia. “Where someone is trying to ruin documentation for the end user, I will go in to bat and say this isn’t going to work.” Rachel said, “I do try to make sure that what I write is ethical and takes responsibility for the end reader and is responsible to the end reader.”
Similarly, considering who they work for is important to these technical writers. William brought up the clients and companies he works with and for as an important site of ethical consideration. “I won’t work for certain industries. I won’t work for the tobacco industry. I won’t work for the coal industry. It kills people.” Josh similarly highlighted how his job selection is shaped based on what he deems as “good.” He believed that certain companies have the potential for causing injury to humans or contributing to climate change.
Adaptation
The educational backgrounds of the technical communicators we interviewed from Australia and New Zealand are diverse, and many did not graduate from college with degrees or certificates in TPC. Interviewee Jolene described her experience working for a construction company as “discriminatory” and “dismissive” due to not holding a degree in engineering. She explained, “When I worked in construction, I was told that I couldn’t write documentation because I wasn’t an engineer. Construction was, and I think still is, very discriminatory or very dismissive of women.” Jill, who has 27 years of experience in TPC, shared a similar experience of not being considered for a job due to not having a graduate degree. Unfortunately, these negative experiences occurred in tandem with a lack of formal education in TPC. However, Jill was able to adapt individually by telling herself that the other person did not know what they were talking about. Jill found confidence in her own experience as a form of training in TPC.
During interviews, we asked: How did you get into the field of technical communication? This question returned an intriguing answer repeated by many interviewees. They responded that they “fell into it.” These technical communicators had varied educations and backgrounds, from pharmacist to scout leader, with remarkable experience between. One of the most experienced and highly educated technical writers that participated in our research described himself as a “lateralist,” moving somewhat naturally from a Bachelor of Economics into computing and then through various technical fields to acquire a diploma of writing and editing to work as a technical writer. “Lateralist” may also describe many other technical communicators in Australia and New Zealand. They have adapted inside organizations and across industries. These “lateralists” demonstrate great adaptation in the workplace.
Their educational and early-career experiences have given them deep subject-matter expertise that have presented them with options for shifting directions in their careers. William, who became a technical communicator over a thirty-year evolution explained, “When the computer industry was really ascending in the 1980s ... I found that I was working with a lot of documentation and I decided to get more formal experience and qualifications in writing and editing, so I did a diploma of official writing and editing.” Rachel, a New Zealander explained her adaptation journey:
I’ve been in IT since the mid-nineties, and I just decided that I didn’t want to be a project manager anymore. I was really living an unhealthy lifestyle, it was a thankless job, and I was good at it, but I didn’t really like it. So, I basically looked around the industry and talked to colleagues. … I cannot remember exactly how it came to me, but technical writing just was a thing … Basically, I did a postgraduate diploma in technical communication from one of our very forward-thinking tertiary institutions here in New Zealand. I just basically rebranded myself as a technical writer.
In the current environment, these examples of adaptation show the need to be process and system savvy, with workers writing and communicating across industries and organizations in order to “rebrand themselves” in roles that may be more gratifying. As various industries have advanced, companies have acknowledged the value or the requirement of technical writing. Companies have moved technical communication from what was viewed as a secondary requirement to a priority of communicating their products and services.
Value
As has been well documented in the field, technical communicators often struggle to prove their worth in the workplace (Redish, 1995; Johnson-Eilola, 1996; Carliner, 1997; Petersen, 2017). The people we interviewed faced that same challenge in how their employers perceive the importance of writing and communication. For example, Aussie Jolene remarked that in her experience, technical communicators are often seen as “lower in the pecking order” because, according to her, in the corporate world there is a lack of respect for the craft. In one incident, Jolene recalled how she was put in charge of putting together workshops on training new employees whose first language wasn’t English. She had initially planned on an interactive experience over the course of several days or even weeks, but she became frustrated when one of her managers decided to cut the workshop time down to only a day and to limit the amount of activity to lecture-style learning.
That manager’s] view was, after those workshops, those staff members should be able to teach their team how to write documentation. It’s disrespectful on so many levels because you employ me, with a rather large sum of money, to be skilled enough to write documentation. Yet you say that after one whole day of me just talking at people, that they should be able to do my job. It’s not giving them the respect of how challenging writing documentation can be.
Another example of this type of undervaluing came from the experience of Sophia, who also encountered similar problems with how the company in Australia viewed her position and how her position was ranked in the organization’s overall hierarchy. She recalled,
Sadly, experiences taught me that if a company is going to retrench people, there are a few titles that will be on the top… It depends on their order, but for sure, it will be trainers, technical writers, testers, and quality control. And then when they reorganize the company, if they need more people to go, they go for HR and marketing… So, it’s very difficult to create value for your profession when management does not see it as a valuable addition.
Similarly, communicator Natalie from Australia also asserted that because her company didn’t value the kind of work she provided to them, she felt as though she was kept in a relatively low position in the company with a noticeable limit on how she could move up the corporate ladder. She explained, “Nothing … I could say or advocate would have me go up the next rung in the corporate ladder. It’s kind of like this is it.… There’s a ceiling to technical writing, and the company has got far more products than it’s got technical writers.”
In stark contrast, although certainly not free from problems or difficulties, technical communicators in New Zealand appear to be much more valued when compared to their Australian counterparts. When questioned on how they advocated for their monetary value, many stated that they felt their work was very much valued by their employers and they didn’t see the need to necessarily justify themselves. In one such example, communicator Hermione remarked that she worked for a company that was predominantly technical writers and could therefore obtain better feedback and receive more acknowledgement for her abilities. In another example, technical communicator Lincoln stated that he and his assistant were the only two people doing any TPC work in his company and were therefore in a position that they could confidently negotiate for more resources.
Community
Some careers encourage more community-based action than others. According to our research, the field of TPC in New Zealand and Australia is highly community-based and collaborative. We had several interviewee responses that emphasized the importance of working in an open-source way, or the ability to work together as a community to achieve a common goal or interest. While one of the most common goals of technical communicators is to make documentation easy to understand for end-users, another important goal is to strengthen community bonds with other technical communicators. These two avenues of community-based focus were present in our interviews.
New Zealand interviewees mentioned TechCommNZ multiple times as a main source of information, networking, and professional opportunities for their TPC community. The importance of having that community was expressed by many interviewees. Wendy said, “I joined and I found that it was a very supportive, inclusive, friendly community, and people I’ve met there have been helping me every step of the way as I progress in my career.” In a similar sentiment, Rachel, a document specialist, recounted, “The majority of my experience is basically in New Zealand-based forums, and TechCommNZ is our official professional organization.” Rachel’s insight that the majority of her experience is essentially New Zealand-based is a common thread among several interviewees.
The only large, international organization that a couple interviewees mentioned being familiar with was Write the Docs, a global community for people who care about documentation. The organization provides a Slack networking system, conferences on multiple continents, and hosts local meetups in dozens of cities. For Rachel, “The only other organization I touch on is Write the Docs, … an international organization of technical writers who come together and advocate for the industry. They do conferences.” Lilly, a New Zealand technical writer, also mentioned Write the Docs: “If you go to their website, they’re an amazing community with a Slack channel and so on…. There are a lot of tech writers on Write the Docs from the West, and what I see on there from New Zealand is more developer documentation.” Rachel and Lilly’s responses show that while there are organizations available for technical communicators in New Zealand to network and collaborate with each other, there does not seem to be many large national networks (or international options) other than TechCommNZ and Write the Docs. Rather, community-based actions are furthered by local and personal efforts.
One example of community-building work done on a local level was provided by interviewee Michael, a New Zealand content developer, who explained how his 1.5-hour commute complicated this work. “We can do this work remotely forever, but the CEO is not too keen on that. He believes in synergy at the office and the company. So, he likes us to meet up at the office as often as possible.” Michael’s CEO puts an emphasis on community at the office because having cooperation in their work is going to create a more advantageous result for everyone involved. Having a more involved and communicative group of technical writers results in better outcomes and products, according to Michael and his CEO. Similarly, Jill explained, “One of the things that technical writers do is facilitate knowledge. And I think part of the mindset means that we share knowledge amongst each other and we form communities where we talk about best practice, and we share our own knowledge about how we do our work in a sort of open-source way.” Working in an open-source way is dependent on collaboration and successful communication within the TPC community. Interviewee Josh said, “We all obviously have a role to play, and I see my role as a technical writer has been very much in a support function, not just to the customers or the product, but also to other members in the team that I’m working with.” While it is important for technical writers to support functions for end-users, it is necessary to create a support system with other technical writers and team members as well.
Work Techniques
Beyond collaboration, we learned much about how these technical communicators engage in work. One of the common themes of work is that of making mistakes. Natalie sometimes felt that she works with a lot of smart people and that she feels like the guinea pig in the organization. She is the one using the products and she makes awkward mistakes; however, she sees that making those mistakes is what is needed when testing a new product. She then thinks about other people and how they may make the same mistakes. Through this process, she thinks about how she can make people’s lives easier and how to do what it is they want to do using a particular product. She can think ahead and address those concerns in her writing. Technical writing is not always easy to understand, so it takes a lot of patience and reviewing of content.
When documentation doesn’t make much sense, Sophia, a technical design specialist, outlined her process. She asks questions of the engineers: “How are you going to do that? Do you need tools to do that? ... Then you have to start from the beginning.” Because being a technical writer means working with subject matter experts, it means learning more about processes and products, such as software and coding. Sophia has learned to address the issue with the engineers and go from there. Sophia’s experiences emphasize the important work technique of usability: looking through documentation, making sure the steps are accurate, and ensuring readability.
Josh sees his orientation to the audience as his strongest work technique:
What is the audience we’re adjusting to? Who are they, what are they, what do they do, and what do they need to know to do it? … We need to get an understanding of exactly where our users are, and there’s going to be a whole range of people with no experience.
This is the kind of problem he attempts to solve each day, and he sees the importance of matching up the users with the documentation that’s being developed. He wants his content to provide the right support for the audience. Technical communicators may not always know the audience they are writing for, but by asking questions, like Josh does, writers can imagine such audiences and write more rhetorically. Natalie defined her TPC work through audience awareness. She said,
Technical writing is like a bridge. So, on the one hand, you have people who have jobs to do and they have been told that if you use this program or this product, it will get done easier. … On the other side, you’ve got developers and business people and project managers that are creating these products and … they may not think from the perspective of the person who will eventually be using the product and what their concerns may be ... My job is to talk to the people who created these new tools and these new products and communicate to the customer in a way that they can get value, in a way they can get the job done they want to get done and to do it using our product.
Many participants emphasized how essential technical communicators are for consumers. They fill the content gap between creator and end-user. They transform complex information into clear, concise, accessible material that is tailored specifically for end-users. In Jolene’s experience, this desire to advocate for the end-user is not always a priority for upper management. Technical writers must then advocate for users even among the priorities within their organizations. Technical communicators in New Zealand and Australia are highly concerned with new ways of thinking about users and audiences in order to enact professionalism.