4. Internal/Procedural

A good technical communicator___

1. accommodates (or tactically counters) changes made by middle men to his/her work;
2. is aware of problems his/her language might create when it is translated or localized;
3. negotiates obstacles (such as difficult persons and sub-optimal ‘improvements’) so that his/her work reaches its audience as intended;
4. is familiar with every stage of the document creation process;
5. demands to check the document before printing, or requests an independent final-stage proofreader/checker;
6. tests the practicality and accuracy of his/her work (uses a dumb operator, for example); 
7. campaigns for a review system loop so that documents can be viewed and reviewed in their various stages before finalization and modified if necessary; and
8. is cautious of ‘wording lists’ or ‘fixed terms’, as these could serve the manufacturer’s branding concerns at cost to user comprehension.

Technical communicators often work in (or as contracted extensions of) structured organisations, whose layers can exert influence over a document’s content (1.). Thus, it pays to factor the input (or interference!) of a secondary audience, whether that is an individual ‘gatekeeper’ such as a supervisor or coordinator, a department, or an automated standardization process. Final content and presentation checking might erroneously modify an intentionally included oddity; and documents may be compromised at several, less obvious stages of production also (when graphics are added, for example). The technical communicator requires full awareness of the entire creation process and applies strategies for countering errors that are likely to occur at each stage within it (3., 4., and 5.).  Such verification practices are especially necessary when translation (an infamously problematic venture[1]) must occur (2.).

Technical communicators, like engineers and systems theorists, know that feedback strengthens any system (7.). Swaney et al (1981, 1991) and Schriver (1984, 1991) developed and advocate ‘protocol-aided revision’, a process wherein writers monitor users thinking aloud while interacting with documentation, thus providing the writers with direct feedback in the form of an unfiltered and highly illustrative commentary, which they can utilize immediately to isolate and rectify sticking points.

Although stylistic consistency is indisputably advantageous to document usability, it is a concept that must be extrapolated with care. Dumas and Reddish (1993) make the observation that it is vital to evaluate instructive text from the user’s position, not the manufacturer’s – an error that entrenched industry with its insistence on sometimes poorly chosen terms is particularly prone to making.

In large organizations, wording is often the duty of committees (1.), who typically have more interest in fashioning marketability via jargon than facilitating user comprehension. Technical communicators realize this, and endeavour to minimize reckless coinage (8.).

[1] Due largely to word and phrase-swapping technologies that can sometimes replace human common sense and skill.