Chapter 2: Technical Writing Process

At this point in your education, you have probably developed your own writing process, and if it works for you, that is just fine, but this section will explain the differences between a general writing process and the technical writing process which focuses on your interaction with end-users.

What is the technical writing process?

As you learned in your composition classes, the general writing process includes prewriting, organizing, drafting, peer reviewing, and revising and editing.  The technical writing process is similar, but since the goal in technical writing is to produce useful deliverables for specific audiences, user interaction and usability testing need to be a significant part of the writing process regardless of the deliverable genre.

Just like the general writing process, this technical writing process is not linear, which means that technical writers don’t always start with the first step (prewriting) and move through all of the steps one at a time. In fact, writing is recursive, which means you may start on one step, go to the next, go back to the first, move to the third, etc., and interact with real users through usability testing throughout the writing process.

This bouncing around the technical writing process allows you to write, move back and forth through steps when necessary, interact with real users, and rewrite to produce a clear, useful, efficient document.

Figure 2.0.1, below, shows what a recursive technical writing process could look like. Notice that all of the arrows point in both directions, which means that you can move through the process from multiple steps. This is not the only image that represents the technical writing process; however, it is not organized linearly as most are. Additionally, user interaction/usability testing is in the middle since you should interact with real users at all steps within this process.

Note: Usability testing does not include a step number since users should be consulted at every step of the writing and designing process.  For your tutorial, however, you must ALWAYS think about your audience at every point in your process.