How To Be A Good Technical Writer

I have been working on “my” art of technical writing for a while now. After all this time, it has become abundantly clear to me that it is not everyone’s cup of tea. To understand why this is, we need to leave the land of technical writing and arrive at the land of writing.

This essay is about the beauty and challenge of writing; a fundamental form of communication. Everybody can write. Yet, not everyone can communicate meaningfully with their writing. Why is this? What empowers some people to communicate so effectively with their writing while many others struggle?

What makes some people “good” writers while many languish as “bad” writers? If these questions intrigue you, then join me in this discussion. By the end of this essay, I will also be tying all of this back to the art of “technical” writing — a very special form of communication. Let us begin.

This essay is supported by Generatebg

Why is Writing “Art”?

I come from a scientific background. Yet, why is it that I refer to writing as “art”? Can science not define a “formula” for what makes for a good writer? Well, not quite.

It is probably much more effective if I illustrate this point rather than explaining it. Here is a two-sentence story for you:

The cat died. The dog died.

That’s it. Before you judge me, I never promised that it would be a good story. Nevertheless, it is a story! When you read it, your brain struggled; you felt uncomfortable. But why? This is because there is a lot of room for interpretation.

This story is an example of “bad” writing. Your brain expects something more. But what is it exactly that your brain prefers? Well, to give you a clue, here is another version of the same story, but in a single sentence:

The dog died because the cat died.

I know; it is still not a very good story. But it is better than its last version. What does it do differently? Sure, it provides more context around the events by connecting them.

But it does something more. What could that “something” be? As you ponder upon the possibilities, here is a third version of the story:

As the cat was playing on top of the roof, it fell down and died unfortunately. Unable to bear the loss of his friend, the dog died two days later.

That is a much better story, right? Well, what did this version do better than the previous two versions? The key lies in the word “story”. The last version told a much better story than the previous versions.

Here’s the takeaway: Any good writer is also necessarily a good story teller. But then, we arrive at the following question:

What makes for a good story?

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The Art of Storytelling

We saw three versions of a story, each progressively better than the previous version. The one common trait between them was that each better version employed more number of words. Does this mean that using more words makes for a better story?

If that were the case, we would all be reading endlessly as each author tries to write a better (longer) story than the other. Here are three points from good stories that I have noticed over the years:

1. A good story does not burden the reader with unnecessary cognitive load.

2. A good story makes the reader guess the next line.

3. A good story features random elements that surprise the reader as she is guessing. These random elements could be in the form of humour, tragedy, surprise, confusion, etc.

Do these points make up the formula for a good story? Well, not quite. These “might” be necessary for a good story but they are surely not sufficient.

Furthermore, there cannot be a formula for a good story. What is “unnecessary cognitive load” for you might be perfectly fine for me. What surprises you might make me feel bored. In other words, stories have a subjective impact on the readers.

If we knew what makes for a good story beforehand, we would be able to deterministically predict which movie is going to be a big box office hit and which one is going to flop before its release. So, we are left at a seemingly dead end here.

If any good writer is necessarily a good story teller and if we do not know what makes for a good story, how do we know what makes for a good writer?

What Makes for a Good Writer?

I apologise beforehand if you find this revelation disappointing. We know that someone is a good writer only after the fact and never before he or she writes. More specifically, the writer cannot know; only the readers (collectively) can tell.

So, in short, we do not know what makes for a good writer. However, I have some good news for you. Even though we do not know what makes for a good writer, we have clues as to what makes for a bad one..

Bad writers are necessarily bad storytellers. And what makes for a bad story? Well, think about all the bad stories you have come across in your life and you’ll have your answer. An unnecessarily complicated plot, poor language, disrespectful drag of time, etc., belong to that list for me.

So, in an ironic plot twist, the best way to become a good writer is to actively try and avoid being a bad one. But here is the paradox: you cannot know if you are a good writer or a bad one before the fact; your readers get to decide.

But you increase your chances of being a good one by not trying to be bad writer to yourself first, and by actively listening to your readers’ feedback next. Now that we have come this far, we might as well step up to technical writing.

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How to be a Good Technical Writer? — The Basics

Most bad technical writers that I come across miss the most obvious fact about technical writing there is:

Good technical writers are ALSO good story tellers.

I have had readers request me to write about certain technical topics. I found this very fascinating. I knew for a fact that these readers were already knowledgeable in these topics. But they were still interested in my version of it.

This reminded me of the time when I used to pester my grandmother to tell me the same story again and again as a child. I knew the story word by word. But I wanted my grandma to narrate it. That, in my opinion, is the power of a “story”.

As unfortunate as it sounds, if a technical text does not feature a good story, it ends up in the “bad” bin. Now that we have gotten that out of the way, we may proceed to the real challenge with technical writing.

How to be a Good Technical Writer? — The Added Challenge

The business of technical writing has an added layer of difficulty associated with it. It is the fact that the technical writer needs to “own” the technical knowledge of his/her text as well. Note that “owning” is very different from “understanding”.

Any student of a subject can “understand” their subject, but “owning” is an entirely different dimension. Owning your technical knowledge allows you to convey that knowledge at extremely different levels of understanding.

A writer who “owns” her technical knowledge would be able to communicate meaningful stories to both a five year old as well as a subject matter expert via the same text. That’s what makes owning technical knowledge special.

As a result, good technical writers are also necessarily good thinkers. A lot of good technical writing actually happens in the head. But of late, there is a new writer who challenges this notion. This writer, arguably, does not even think!

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Is Artificial Intelligence a Good Technical Writer?

We are in an age where technologies like ChatGPT are able to mimic human writing. Can such technologies replace good writers? Well, perhaps. But here is my take on this topic.

Generative models such as ChatGPT are trained on datasets that are already available. To anyone who is aware of the current state-of-the-art in any topic, anything ChatGPT comes up with will not be of surprise.

But a good technical writer has the potential to come up with new and unique insights; insights that the world has never seen before. That is precisely what makes good writers worth their weight in gold.

Another concern about writing is, as more and more people flock to short-form video content, whether “writing” will still be around in the future. I’ll quote Paul Graham’s take on this topic:

“Reading won’t be obsolete till writing is, and writing won’t be obsolete till thinking is.”

— Paul Graham.

Final Comments

One of the trickiest challenges for good technical writers is the fact that they deliberately limit their upside. If this does not make sense to you, let me elaborate. A good technical writer is necessarily a good writer.

If a good technical writer chooses to write about more mainstream topics, chances are that they will do better as a writer. But they limit their upside by narrowing their focus down to technical topics. But I guess this is a good problem to have.

I’ll conclude by saying that throughout this essay, I have written what I think good writers and bad writers “necessarily” are. But note that I do not and cannot know what they “sufficiently” are. Does that make me a bad writer? I do not know. You are the reader; you get to decide!

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Further reading that might interest you: 

• How To Actually Run A Growing Science Blog.
• The Ghostwriter Problem: Is There Really No End To It?
• Startup Ideas: Is There Value In Ranking Creators?

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