Beyond Writing…
As Margaret Cekis suggested in a comment to a previous post, we might want to rename Technical Communication, Effective Communication, as the skills that we teach are just as needed in non-technical areas. But notice that we’ve retained the word “communication” and not change it to effective “writing”. Why? Because, to be truly effective today, we need to understand how to both write AND how to disseminate that writing - and with today’s technology, there are more ways to do that than ever before.
Once upon a time, writing was an activity of transferring thoughts to paper. But today, of course, it is involves much more than that - there are so many more ways to disseminate what we have written: online blogs, wikis, online presentations, e-books, even facebook and twitter - all of these provide new ways to publish the written word and to make it available to wider and wider audiences.
The Effective Communicator of today must have a good understanding of when, and how, to use these communication forms and channels. And, these are not mere “conduits” for making writing visible - the forms themselves influence the writing, both in style and content- i.e., you will write a Twitter tweet differently than a sentence in a paragraph - yet both have their place, and both can be highly effective.