Technical writing for finance: one for the Friday files

[Geoff Hart <ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca>]

Ned Bedinger noted: <<Wow, nice save, Dan! It took me a second to  
grasp the importance of  defending our turf against these loosely- 
focused insinuations that jargon and complexity are the key to tech  
writing. There's destructive reductionism lurking out there, in all  
of those alternative career paths where writing, even explanatory  
instructional writing, is featured.>>

Hang on a second, guys. I never said anything of the sort. What I did  
say is that there are a great many more professions than computer  
documentation in which it's important to understand jargon and deal  
with complexity, which is a very different thing. Biology and physics  
and chemistry (among other sciences) represent one very large and  
obvious group; economics (science fiction, really) is another; and  
even the language of dance notation (as described by Edward Tufte in  
one of his first two books) is another. The point here is that the  
genre is _technical_: it has certain conventions you must understand  
and requires certain knowledge and skills before you can work  
successfully with the complexity in that genre.

Also note that jargon does not inevitably mean "words chosen so that  
only the illuminati will understand or words chosen to make the  
speaker sound more important than they really are". That's certainly  
one form of jargon; the other kind involves language chosen because  
it communicates efficiently among people working within a genre. We  
speak here on techwr-l of WinHelp vs. WebHelp vs. HTMLHelp not  
because we're trying to exclude anyone (which would be the case if we  
were talking to non-techwhirlers) or sound smarter than we really  
are, but rather because this jargon communicates effectively. Imagine  
if we had to explain the details of what we mean by "help" every time  
we talked about anything related!

<<In an age where everyone seem bent on making a blind stab at  
defining tech writing as a department and a skillset, it seems to me  
very patriotic to repel borders this way.>>

I assume you're being sarcastic, or perhaps just waving the flag  
without really thinking it through? Any definition can be carried to  
extremes, and that's exactly the wrong point to be making. The right  
point to make is that technical communication really is a skillset,  
not exclusively "writing in the computer industry". That's an  
unnecessarily narrow worldview, and while it might be appropriate for  
the specific community that is techwr-l, it's much like the goldfish  
circling his tiny bowl and being amazed at how rich and diverse his  
world is... particularly that cool little castle. <g>


----------------------------------------------------
-- Geoff Hart
ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca / geoffhart -at- mac -dot- com
www.geoff-hart.com
--------------------------------------------------
Coming soon:  _Effective onscreen editing_ (http://www.geoff-hart.com/ 
home/onscreen-book.htm)

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