Matching your technical writing to the goal you want to accomplish

Much of the writing you’ll do in your technical career will be for one of three purposes: dissemination, persuasion, and information.

There are other areas, such as writing to express personal opinions, but these don’t show up often in the course of your professional writing. There is some overlap between dissemination, persuasion, and information (and other people use different divisions) but these divisions are unique enough to be useful.

We’ll spend the next several posts exploring each of these types of writing, but let’s have a quick overview.

Writing to disseminate

When you are publishing the results of new research or details of a new product in a technical setting, you are writing to disseminate.

User manuals are dissemination documents, as are technical specifications given to design specialists, white papers that familiarize technical audiences with your technology, and so on.

This mode of writing is characterized by the fact that you aren’t trying directly to convince anyone to take a specific action or make a specific decision.

Writing to persuade

When writing to persuade, by contrast, you are explicitly trying to convince your audience to do—or think, or say—a specific thing.

With persuasive writing you are trying to convince them that your idea, product, or solution is the one they should select or act upon. You are really selling your idea to the audience. Not only do you have to give them enough technical information to understand, implement, or act upon your solution, but you also have to convince them of the superiority of your approach over competing approaches.

Writing to inform

Much of your writing, at least early in your career, will be writing to inform. When you are writing to inform, you are creating a document that provides a status or progress report, a new perspective, or an opinion for your audience. For example, project progress reports are information products.

I’ve separated this from writing to disseminate (or educate) mostly because of the different time scales that the written products have.

When you write to disseminate, your document is valuable as long as the technology you are describing is relevant; sometimes this is years or decades. When you are writing to inform, your document is only relevant until the information you have presented is consumed.

Think about which broad purpose your writing fits best

As you shape the specific piece of the larger topic you are discussing, you’ll want to consider your goals for the document. Are you trying to share new research results in a technical interchange with peers? Are you trying to convince your reading audience of the merits of a particular technical approach? Are you updating your management chain on project progress?

Next we’ll talk about the three goals and how your approach with each may vary.