The “Good” Technical Communicator

Nobody wants to hire someone who is going to be bad at their job. But definitions of “good” and “bad” will vary according to the job being performed, the subjectivity of the person judging the worker, and the (ideally more subjective) measurement of the quality of the worker’s performance or product. The technical communicator loathes ambiguity. So “good” – especially since it appears in quotation marks – demands a definition. Without such explanatory foregrounding, subsequent arguments and reasoning might be construable as foundationless.[1]

Let us proceed then on the assumption that “good”, in terms of the technical communicator, can be defined as:

Signifying an author whose product, by identifiable, empirically supported, and (ideally) theoretically sound means, efficiently and economically transfers factual and correct technical information to an audience/user who is then demonstrably capable of performing in the way intended by the author to produce a specific and satisfactory outcome and/or can communicate an expanded understanding of a technically-related problem, issue, or task via effective instruction and/or accurate exposition.[2]

The various characteristics detailed as follows fall, by classifiable associability, into six categories. Their ordering (from practical to theoretical) reflects the author’s opinion and survey findings regarding their degree of centrality to the process of information production – the former being of most importance, the latter ranking as supplementary and beneficial rather than essential.

Many of the points listed in the first two categories correlate approximately with procedures of local revision as defined by Burnett (2004), others concern acquisition of and familiarity with information about users/audiences, style, and subject matter. The third and fourth categories delineate concepts that are, in the majority, associable with procedures of global revision (Burnett 2004), and as such cover utilization and organization of information and related practices. The final two categories cover characteristics that are beneficial but less specific to technical communicators.

[1] ‘Characteristics’ is similarly interpretable: in psycho-social terms, personal and interpersonal traits are implied; I have ranked discussion of such at lower priority because in the context of this work, ‘characteristics’ alludes to the skills and practices deemed by consensus to be most necessary to technical authorship (rather than to editorship or graphic design work).

[2] Author’s definition.