Technical communicators have to know how to write clearly, at the same time that the writing sounds friendly and personable. There are really two kinds of explanatory material that technical communicators must write:

Marketing explanations: these can be very broad, marketing oriented explanations of features and benefits such as you find in a brochure; or they can be more detailed as you find in a Product Overview or White Paper. Writing good marketing material (called “copy”) is an art that requires understanding what motivates people – sensitivity to language, to buzz words, to the emotional content of expressions – all of these come to play in marketing writing – this is what we learn in the Marcom module.

Technical Explanations: this includes the introductory explanations that you find before an operating procedure or at the beginning of a chapter in a technical manual. It also includes the manual’s general Overview of the product.  In all of these cases, the writing should be clear but comprehensive. This is more difficult than it sounds because writers must be sensitive to what readers want to know while they are reading – i.e. you have to “get inside” the reader’s head and figure out, sentence by sentence, what that reader expects to find in the next sentence. This is the art of writing – and it takes practice to make sure that the writing is complete enough to satisfy readers, but not too dense as to lose them (we learn this skill in the Technical Writing module.

The Problem

Write a general introduction explaining a "pencil".

 

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