Academic.vs.Technical.Writing

 Since there is a discussion of the differences between academic writing and technical writing, let me give you the perspective of someone who has done both. There are very important differences between academic and technical writing. One must also realize that there are also different types of academic writing and different types of technical writing. First of all, the purposes and audiences are different between academic and technical writing.  The purposes of academic writing can be: 1) to present the results of one's knowledge, 2) to present the results gained from one's personal research, 3) to present one's point of view.

Of course, both technical and academic writing is laden with jargon, but the jargon is used for different purposes. As far as technical writing is concerned, the **purposes of technical writing can be:** 1) to teach someone how to use a specific product or service; 2) to describe the procedures that are employed by companies for carrying out various tasks. The audiences are completely different. The academic is writing to fellow scholars, and often, depending on the journal or publication, to the general public. The technical writer is writing to the user of the product or the service, or to government inspectors who need to see how the company carries out certain tasks. Users, of course, differ from product to product. In addition, technical writing differs from area to area. For example, writing documentation for software is different from writing documentation for hardware. When I took a technical writing course as part of my professional retraining, I had to unlearn a lot of what I had been doing as an academic writer. We are dealing with different styles of writing altogether. Also, there is good and bad academic and technical writing, and a good academic writer may not become a good technical writer and vice versa.

I have seen downright awful academic writing, where the author wrote extremely unclear and obscure prose, and I have seen extremely garbled technical writing, where it was difficult to follow the instructions.

The important variable here is teachability. If an academic writer who wants to become a technical writer is not teachable, especially coming from the academic and liberal arts world, he/she will not be a good technical writer.

Good academic writing is not enough--teachability is the most important factor. <span style="background-color: #ffffff; display: block; font-family: 'Open Sans',sans-serif; text-align: left;">One of the most important tasks of interviewers of candidates for technical writing jobs, especially candidates who have not had professional experience, is not just simply to look at the writing samples of the candidates, but to assess how teachable they are.

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; display: block; font-family: 'Open Sans',sans-serif; text-align: left;">If the candidate has both academic and technical writing samples, the interviewer should be able to assess whether the candidate has grasped the differences between the two types of writing. This is one way to measure teachability.

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; display: block; font-family: 'Open Sans',sans-serif; text-align: left;">A bit of advice for academics who want to go into technical writing is to peruse all the various types of manuals and documentation written by technical writers to get a sense of what is involved in technical writing.