Defining Technical and Professional Writing

Technical and professional writing is an important field of study to incorporate into a lot of different work contexts. The writer can help multiple departments of people, creating a specialist to work with different kinds of writings. A technical and professional writer could be beneficial for the CEA Forum by reviewing its website, editing workflow documents, and doing any other upkeep tasks for the website, its upcoming issue, and its public Facebook page. Technical writers add more insight than other possible candidates might, because they have knowledge of writing, editing, design, and other helpful elements, making them well-rounded candidates to help a company.

A degree in Technical and Professional Writing is similar to having multiple degrees in different fields, because technical writing has many elements to it. A technical writing employee can manage both internal and external documents. Allen explains in “The Case against Defining Technical Writing” that defining technical writing itself can be harmful to people’s understanding of it, because when it is done it always puts the field in a box too small, focusing too much on one aspect of a wide variety of talents a technical writer has. In the case of working with the College English Association Forum, a technical writer can assist in the creation of new issues of the journal, interaction with readers, and upkeep of the website itself. The College English Association and the Forum both use Facebook as a social interaction tool to interact with people, so the technical writer can be involved in the public relations aspects that would usually need an entire other position. The technical writer can perform the actions of multiple employees, saving a company money that they would have to spend on multiple hires.

A technical and professional graduate, and, in particular, one from a humanities department, would be nothing but beneficial to a modern company. Degrees in the humanities are often overlooked in technical and scientific fields, but these candidates Bachelors of Arts Degrees are the exact things giving them a linguistic leg up on the competition. A technical degree in a humanities department gives a graduate knowledge of both sides of the spectrum. They will know how to articulate eloquently, and also when to slash a document with a red pen, editing down to only what is needed. Well-written emails, wide-audience memos, and technical documents like instructions are all within this candidates reach. A technical writer has their handle on rhetoric, and also understands how to get to the point and describe procedures that a scientist can execute but maybe not articulate in a more universally understandable way.

 Jo Allen, “The Case against Defining Technical Writing”