The gap between academic and industry technical writing: What it is, why it exists, why it's important, and what we can do about it (Part I)
- The worlds are different
- Translating one to the other is often a challenge
- The reality is nuanced
- About Jeremy Rosselot-Merritt
It’s no secret that academic and practitioner approaches to technical writing have differed for decades—often profoundly so. Even if not a topic of daily discussion, this difference is well documented. For example, Tom Johnson and Lisa Melonçon discussed it in a 2015 podcast on I’d Rather Be Writing. More recently, Nupoor Ranade and I joined Tom in March to talk about AI and technical writing, and the topic came up again. Academic scholarship has addressed this issue periodically over the years, too, including in work like Ryan Boettger and Erin Friess’s excellent 2016 article “Academics Are from Mars, Practitioners Are from Venus: Analyzing Content Alignment within Technical Communication Forums” and, even earlier, in “The State of Research in Technical Communication” by Ann Blakeslee and Rachel Spilka (2004).
But why does this gap exist, and why does it matter? These are two of the questions I intend to help answer in this column, but in a nutshell:
- Despite overlaps in how humans interact more generally, the two exist in very different worlds, with different professional currencies, incentives, and ways of building value.
- Each speaks a different professional language, and often those languages don’t easily “translate.”
- Academia faces specific, somewhat unique challenges and tensions.
- At the same time, the relationship between the two is important because practitioner needs can inform quality research when academic researchers understand those needs. Similarly, good, practice-facing research helps technical writers work better and solve problems more effectively.
The third question I will address in this column—what can we do about this?—is honestly a bit harder to answer. Part of the answer finds precedent in past successes, and part of the answer is admittedly speculative simply because we as a field don’t have the most robust set of precedents to draw from. But we can suggest some possible solutions, and I think those solutions are worth working toward.
The worlds are different
When we think about technical writing, we can think of it a few different ways: in terms of titles, specific kinds of applications, and practitioner and academic standpoints. Because the academic and practitioner approaches are often divorced from one another—one doesn’t always talk to the other—it’s hard to put them into conversation, which is something that is sorely needed for the future viability of technical writing. To put them into conversation, however, we first have to understand what makes them different.
Different ecosystems
The respective ecosystems are incredibly different. To be clear, not every academic institution or every industry organization works in a certain way. That would be unrealistic. However, academia is really a system unto itself, and the rules of engagement in that system are among the most unique that I’ve encountered. This makes it, at times, challenging to work in higher ed as a faculty member and then transition to industry, or to work in industry for, let’s say, a decade and then try to enter higher education as a faculty member.
In most workplace settings—whether we’re talking for-profit industry, non-profit, government, or a number of others—your primary instrumental reward is monetary. In many cases, there is a certain number of hours you’re expected to work, whether you’re paid by the hour or compensated with a straight salary. You very likely have periodic performance reviews with a manager. You may get raises or promotion opportunities depending on the organization and your performance. If for some reason you look for a job and find one, that can happen at any time of year, and in most cases you’re expected to give 2 weeks notice, and then you move on to the next job.
In an academic faculty job, it’s a completely different world. The labor is very different, for one. Most faculty roles require that you do some combination of research, teaching, and what academics typically refer to as “service,” which can involve sitting on committees, peer-reviewing journal articles, directing a program, and a number of other things. A lot of that labor is unpaid. For example, almost no one gets paid to review journal articles in the anonymous peer review process; that’s been the case for decades. A common thing you’ll hear among faculty is a quip to the effect of: “In this job, you have a lot of flexibility: you gotta work 80 hours, but you can totally decide how to split those 80 hours each week.”
The nature of the academic faculty system itself is also markedly different. Most faculty are organized into different “tracks” or “lines” defined by an institution. Tenure track, where a faculty member is hired into an ostensibly permanent (yet initially provisional) role, tends to be the most prestigious and the most difficult to attain. Other tracks, such as teaching track and lecturer track, typically involve contracts of different lengths (1-3 years, for example), and in some cases are renewable based on funding and performance. Adjuncting, where a faculty member is hired literally by the course and often with relatively low pay and limited or no benefits, is increasingly common. It’s kind of the equivalent of subcontracting in industry without the increased pay differential that many subcontractors get.
What is valued in each space also differs. In many non-academic jobs, success is defined by what a person achieves in terms of deliverables or business metrics. In those settings, success is often quantifiable in terms of financial gain or growth or customer satisfaction metrics. In academic faculty jobs, “success” is often tied to certain metrics—such as student ratings of teaching—yet there’s also an accompanying “prestige economy” that is equally present and often much harder to define in easily tangible terms; that economy, as it were, does not translate neatly to non-academic spaces. For example, many academics understandably worry about publishing in a certain “tier” of journals in their field, especially in research-heavy faculty positions. They consider what their service to their department and university, as well as service to their discipline in national terms, looks like. If they’re in a tenure-track position, they understandably think about whom they can get to write external letters for their tenure file. Many of these characteristics—and the economy surrounding them—are perception-based or reputational.
Different currencies and reward systems
In higher education, publication is often considered the highest form of academic currency. This is especially true at research-intensive institutions, but the perception exists more broadly across higher ed, too. Publications carry significant weight, but their weight exists primarily in scholarly circles—at least in terms of the effect that it has on one’s career. There’s a lot of clout chasing and concern about impact factor, citation counts, and so on. Very few people in industry would even know what some of those terms mean. In fact, if someone were to transition out of the professoriate, publications would have variable weight. In many companies, they wouldn’t matter much at all, especially in a field like technical writing.
Now if we look at industry again, the calculus changes significantly. People worry about promotions. They worry about pay. Increasingly people worry about work-life balance, which I think is actually a good thing. Academic jobs, at times, almost encourage overlap between work and life. This can be true in industry jobs as well, but at least in my experience, the difference is quite large. If someone’s concerned about work-life balance, for instance, they could go on the job market and potentially make a transition in a few weeks or months, regardless of time of year. In the academic world, job cycles work very differently, and someone may be effectively locked into a position for another academic year. What’s more, academic positions—particularly in the humanities and liberal arts these days—don’t grow on trees. To make a move like that, you may not just have to move jobs; you might have to move halfway across the country if you found one.
Different pacing
I’ve found that higher education is one of the slowest-changing environments of which I’ve been a part. Big change happens slowly. Usually it’s the product of a glacial pace of committee meetings, various votes and group discussions, often a certain amount of debate that you just don’t often see nearly as much of in industry. That’s a particularly big difference right there: so much of what happens in higher education is tied to various committees and task-oriented groups. Want to make a hire? After you actually get approval from a certain office, there’s a committee that figures out what you’re hiring for, and then that committee puts out the hiring notice and interviews candidates. Want to develop a departmental statement about the virtues (or lack thereof) of GAI? Put together an ad hoc committee dedicated to that purpose.
Now to be fair, committees absolutely exist in industry. The activities committee. The executive committee. At least in my experience, however, there were far fewer committees, and consequential decisions (such as when someone needed to be hired) could be made without having to form a committee and undergo a sometimes convoluted series of events.
Industry itself tends to be more agile, more nimble, than higher education. Some of the reasons for that are structural in nature: universities are large institutions with many different stakeholders and dozens, often hundreds, of academic departments and various offices that keep the apparatus functioning. Public universities have additional state oversight that add additional complexity around use of taxpayer funds and public resource stewardship.
The generative AI era provides an excellent example of this dichotomy in practice. While many companies have already included generative AI in their workflows, in academic settings we’re often still discussing GAI on a philosophical level—an important but time-consuming move. While a small heat treating company in the Midwest has developed GAI agents to help document custom metallurgical processes for its customers, many of us in academia are writing articles trying to make sense of the technology in terms of teaching and the day-to-day function of the academy, posting about those articles on LinkedIn, and conversing in long, iterative ways about all of the philosophical and functional minutiae—not a bad thing at all, just time-consuming. This is something I’ll revisit in principle in Part II.
Translating one to the other is often a challenge
Because the ecosystems are so vastly different, and because the rewards and incentives for success are so different in one compared to the other, it’s very difficult to do two things:
- To describe one in terms of the other
- To carry over the vocabulary from one to the other
Vocabulary and jargon
The words and phrases used in the industry workplace vary significantly from those used in, for example, the academic humanities. For example, here’s something you might hear in an industry meeting:
I agree with Craig about leveraging web analytics not just to better understand users’ interactions with affiliate storefronts, but also to see whether A-B testing is really helping us understand more about the customer journey at a deep level. There’s a real value-add there.
And perhaps in an academic setting:
With my grad students, I really try to lean into actor network theory as much as I can when we’re talking about the rhetoric of entrepreneurship. I don’t necessarily want to privilege one framework over another, but at the same time I don’t want it to turn into some ceremonial neoliberal-adjacent apologism. I think leaning into the theory, even with the entrepreneurial focus, will help elide accommodationist thinking.
Take either statement into the other setting and the result is the same: glazed over expressions at best, frustration and irritation at worst.
Describing one in terms of the other
This may sound silly on the surface, but it’s really an important distinction. In my experience with industry, there was a lot of cross-sector pollination. For example, an engineer working for an air compressor company may need to speak with a sales executive at a retail home improvement chain about changes that customers want on two of their house-branded compressor lines. Then the person at the home improvement chain gets off the phone with the air compressor engineer and talks to someone at an ad agency about a pop-up display that the sales executive needs for a trade show. The engineer, for their part, sends an email to their account executive at the packaging company about changes they’ll need on their product boxes to accommodate the home improvement chain. It’s likely that the engineer knows very little about how to design packaging in Adobe Illustrator; similarly, the client representative at the ad agency probably knows little to nothing about how to run a home improvement store. Yet all of these professionals engage daily with people in different industries for the purpose of getting work done—ideally, on time with as little friction as possible—for their own business. And here’s the key: if you or any of these people tried to explain what it is that you did in your specific role, chances are they could get the gist of it even if they didn’t understand the company specifically. In the academy, by contrast, our professional attention tends to turn inward, toward the (academic) discipline and its conversations, rather than outward across sectors—so that when we try to move outward into non-academic spaces, two things happen: it’s harder for us to “translate,” and it’s therefore harder for industry practitioners to understand what we’re describing.
I have a good friend from high school that I talk to often. I remember one time many years ago, we were having one of those “what I do” conversations where I happened to be telling him about some of my work as an academic. He’s a thoughtful and intelligent person, and he takes interest in those conversations, generally speaking. I remember he told me: “So, I hear what you’re saying, but in my line of work, we would never have the time for those kinds of meetings or discussions.” He and his colleagues had to move nimbly, quickly, and with minimal debate, simply to meet deadlines and keep customers on their order sheets. At the end of the day, he has to leave and pick up his daughter from dance, then go home and eat dinner and prepare for a similar process the next day. It’s not a “rinse and repeat” kind of thing so much as it is the reality of his world of work. In the academy, we may have creative latitude in our research and the ability to design courses; at the same time, it can be extremely challenging to communicate the nature and value of that work to someone who’s never done it or been close to someone who’s done it.
With such differences, can a person in one setting communicate the value of what they do to someone in the other setting? In my experience, it can be done, but it can be difficult. If anything, I have found it much easier to communicate the value of teaching, and in some cases research, to my colleagues in business and industry. The converse, of sorts—communicating the value of a business or industry approach to someone in the academic humanities—can be much more challenging.
The reality is nuanced
It’s possible for two or more things to be true at the same time, even when those things feel emotionally incongruent or inconvenient in some way. This is where things get really interesting.
For example, years ago, some of my colleagues thought that I believed that someone has to have industry experience to effectively teach a course in technical writing. That is simply not true. While there are obvious benefits to having industry experience in that context, some of the best technical writing teachers I’ve worked with had little if any such experience. What’s more, some of the most popular and beneficial courses in our field are not “workplace-focused courses” to begin with—at least not on paper. For example, one excellent teacher I know teaches a course in feminist rhetoric that is wildly popular with students. Not only is it extremely popular: it gives them valuable knowledge and skills for the future—critical thinking, better understanding of theory, understanding of how important social change has been achieved over time.
At the same time, there’s no question that having workplace experience does provide a perspective to a teacher or researcher that is difficult to replicate otherwise. That’s not a particularly controversial point. However, you’ll still find views that tend to complicate the notion. Here are some paraphrased examples of things I’ve heard over the years.
- “I’ve taught [insert course name(s)], so I understand the industry field.”
- “There’s no way that that idea you have about helping students understand behind-the-scenes workplace politics will ever work” (notably said when the person has never worked outside the academy, nor did they apparently have any knowledge of someone who had done what I was doing before)
- “Basically, industry is made up of brainwashed capitalists who only care about money.” (I’ve met plenty of people in industry who are unabashedly not in favor of capitalism as a system but work within it because they, essentially, need to survive as a part of that current system)
- “I had a conversation the other day with someone who works at [insert company or organization name], and the idea of being a scrum master makes so much sense now” (I’ve worked with multiple scrum masters in the past, and I still don’t fully understand what they do)
Not surprisingly, there are also common mistakes in how members of the public perceive both academia and how academics research and teach technical communication. Here are some paraphrased variations of some that I’ve heard.
- “You all in academia have such a cush job.” (I invite you to try doing this job for a week and see how you feel about it then.)
- “Tenure should be abolished. It never had a purpose and now every academic can get it and never worry about their jobs.” (Have you read about the history of tenure and why it exists in the first place? Do you know the pressures that go along with trying to get it and how rare it’s becoming?)
- “Basically, a university is just a clearinghouse for progressive politics.” (Colleges and universities are very complicated spaces with myriad faculty and quite a range of viewpoints. There’s a tremendous amount of nuance that lives there.)
- “I wish I made the kind of money you do.” (Well, I work at a state institution, so my salary is public information—have at it.)
What’s common to these statements is that many of the people I’ve heard making them have never worked a day in the world on which they’re commenting, whether it’s an industry professional talking about life in an academic setting or an academic talking about their perception of what it’s like outside their own world. In that sense, it’s not just that some of those statements are misinformed; it’s also that the statements are, in many cases, directionally inaccurate.
One area of overlap: People and organizations
When you push back some of the brush, a lot of the underlying trees in the forest are very similar. You have talents, shortcomings, a vast array of personalities, egos, insecurities, personal goals rubbing up against institutional or departmental goals, family strain that bleeds into the workplace—none of this is unique to higher ed. It’s common there, it’s common in industry, it’s common among just about any group of humans.
Both academics and people in the industry workplace have lives outside of their jobs. They have families. They have hobbies. They have passions that go way beyond the ivied halls. Academics, obviously, are human just like anyone else—and despite the titles and degrees and quotes in various publications, they still have their own talents and insecurities, and they have worldviews that other people in society have, too. And there are so many faculty members—in fact, a vast majority, I would say—who care about their fields and their students and the world around them, even if in some cases they may experience that world a bit differently.
In both, people want to “make their mark.” In industry, that might be an innovative product feature for which a product engineer gets both credit and a shared patent; it might be a promotion or some kind of “first” in their industry. In higher education, there’s often a strong feeling early in an academic’s career—one that’s often spurred on and reinforced by early career training in PhD programs—that “success” in an academic role means making some kind of long-term mark on the scholarly character of that field, whether that’s a new idea, a new theory, a rethinking of an existing theory, and so on.
Another area of overlap: Organizational pressures and frictions exist in both
Since people make up organizations, this one naturally flows from the “people are people” assertion. Not surprisingly, both industry and higher education experience organizational pressures that everyone in those organizations will have to deal with in some way. I’ve summarized the types of pressures that exist—and provided examples of how those pressures may play out in each—in the table below.
| Type of pressure/friction | Example in industry | Example in academia |
|---|---|---|
| Resource limitations | There’s not enough time or certified auditors to conduct an ISO quality audit. | A department needs to staff multiple spots in three different committees but doesn’t have enough faculty to do so. |
| Workload and deadline pressure | A client wants their 400-page repair manual finalized by the end of the week. | Grades are due in 2 days and there are still 80 final papers left to grade. |
| Rules and red tape | An employee wants to use samples of past work in a professional portfolio but has to navigate company policies, client confidentiality, and approval from multiple people before knowing what they can share. | A new faculty member spends part of their first year learning their university’s policies and procedures while simultaneously learning the guidelines for promotion and retention unique to their department. |
| Internal politics and personalities | A well-placed administrative assistant and a new sales director can’t stand one another. When one of the salespeople schedules travel (which must be approved by the admin), there are frequent cost and scheduling questions that come up. Strangely, none of the other departments have that problem. | A senior faculty member feels threatened when a junior colleague publishes in a highly regarded journal. During later conversations about tenure standards, the senior faculty member downplays the journal’s value, even though others in the department see it as a strong accomplishment. |
| Recognition and advancement | The company decides to promote someone to a director position from within. The person’s qualifications are thin, but management must see something no one else does. | A grant is awarded to a researcher for a research proposal. The proposal seems to match the criteria in some ways, but not in others—which isn’t completely surprising since the criteria weren’t very clear to begin with. |
| Leadership changes | A privately owned company, once run by a family that valued consistency and rarely laid off employees, is sold to a private equity firm, leading to a drastic change in organizational culture. | Looking to streamline processes, a university’s Board of Trustees appoints a new president—the first in the school’s history with no previous experience in higher education. |
| Siloing and coordination challenges | Sales and engineering agree on a key enhancement to a monthly software update, but neither communicates it to documentation until the day before the next update is scheduled. | A large English Department has faculty in fields ranging from creative writing to literature to film studies, and few of those faculty understand or particularly care about the department’s professional writing program. |
| External relationships and pressures | A local company’s management struggles with whether to continue its annual United Way campaign, which is costly and time-consuming for the company, yet ultimately decides to because its success is strongly tied to community goodwill. | An academic department grapples with what to do with its industry advising board, which students really value for internship and mentoring purposes but requires immense labor from the two faculty members who coordinate it with no additional help or time off from teaching a full course load. |
The divide is real, but so is the common ground. And yet, as a collective field, we still struggle to make the relationship between academic and industry technical communication consistent and mutually reinforcing. In Part II, I’ll make the case for why that struggle matters more now than it ever has—and what we can do about it.
Continue reading the second part of this essay: The gap between academic and industry technical writing: What it is, why it exists, why it’s important, and what we can do about it (Part II).
About Jeremy Rosselot-Merritt
Jeremy Rosselot-Merritt is an assistant professor in the School of Writing, Rhetoric, and Technical Communication at James Madison University, where he teaches courses on technical communication in business, industry, and organizational contexts. In his research, he studies workplace communication, workplace dynamics (such as organizational climate), the application of technical communication across industries, and how professionals in different fields perceive technical communication. Jeremy was a practicing technical writer for 15 years in industries ranging from biopharmaceuticals to software-as-a-service (SaaS) and pneumatic tools manufacturing. He holds a PhD in Rhetoric and Scientific & Technical Communication (RSTC) from the University of Minnesota and a Master of Technical and Scientific Communication (MTSC) degree from Miami University (Ohio) and can be reached at [email protected].