Writing to disseminate
We’re talking right now about the number one most critical skill that can drive your career success and impact: writing. The last thing we talked about was that if you are going to write effectively you’ve got to know why you are writing, and we identified 3 modes of written technical communication. Let’s talk about the first one in more detail…
When you are educating you are 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.
Users manuals are dissemination documents, as are technical specifications given to design specialists, white papers that familiarize technical audiences with your technology, and so on.
You aren’t trying directly to convince anyone to take a specific action or make a specific decision. In writing for dissemination, you are preparing your audience to apply knowledge, information, facts, or processes that you have developed to their specific purposes. You are writing to educate.
Academic and professional publications
Another important form of writing that is primarily educational is the professional publication produced in some settings to demonstrate a substantive contribution by an individual researcher to a specific field.
For example, in university settings before a staff member is granted tenure, she has to show a body of technical contributions to her field.
This is most often demonstrated by having a certain number of refereed journal publications in science and engineering fields; in the humanities, such as history, it is frequently by books. Many government and industrial R&D organizations have similar requirements for career advancement beyond a particular level.
Remember: your goal is to communicate with your audience! Even if they are academics.
It may at first appear that these publications are less directly tied to a specific goal for your audience—that your goal is simply to publish enough to advance the next step in your career.
If you write from this perspective you are less likely to be successful in communicating the essential concepts to your audience (and remember, communication is what this is all about). Review committees for conferences and journals are looking for contributions that advance the state of the field and that clearly articulate the core ideas.
In other words, they are looking for contributions that other researchers in the field can use to advance their own research. So while your personal goal may simply be to get another article published, your goal for your audience will be to articulate the benefits of your research, and to possibly persuade them that your approach will allow them to build to the next step in their research.
