My upcoming presentation and workshop at the 2019 STC Summit in Denver
Here’s the presentation I’m giving at the STC Summit:
Tech Comm Trends: Providing Value as a Generalist in a Sea of Specialists
Trends in technical communication can be hard to decipher, even when looking at data. But one underlying trend is that technology seems to be getting more specialized and complex. This trend toward specialization is driving up the value of technical knowledge, making it more prized than writing skills. To handle the complexity, technical writers may find that they are playing increasingly collaborative roles with engineers to create the needed documentation. To drive up their value in organizations, technical writers should look for ways to collaborate more skillfully with engineers in creating content.
Takeaways:
- The growing complexity in the technology landscape is ratcheting up the importance of technical knowledge in organizations, overshadowing writing skills.
- Creating documentation is becoming more of a collaborative effort with engineers due to the increasing level of complexity and specialization in the technology landscape.
- Documentation processes are moving towards docs-as-code tools in part because engineers are more involved in the authoring processes, and they prefer to use tools they’re familiar with.
See the Full Schedule for details.
My preconference workshop is on API documentation. See the Preconference Workshops for details. The workshop will cover the same topics as in my API documentation site.
You can learn more about the STC Summit here: https://summit.stc.org/.
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About Tom Johnson
I'm an API technical writer based in the Seattle area. On this blog, I write about topics related to technical writing and communication — such as software documentation, API documentation, AI, information architecture, content strategy, writing processes, agent skills, tech comm careers, and more. Check out my AI courses for more on the latest in AI and tech comm. If you're looking for info about documenting APIs, see my API documentation course.
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Finally, I want to note a couple of things. I usually write the first drafts of my posts myself and then use AI to improve accuracy, clarity, and detail in places, so my writing is a mix of human and AI. (Hopefully that's not too off-putting.) Also, the opinions I express on my blog are my own perspectives, not those of my employer.