Writing about Writing - Musings from a technical writer

I have always had a knack for reading technical documents. It might have been the 3 years of thesis work I did, where I read through hundreds of IEEE journals and conference papers to find the perfect ones to use for my self-driving vehicle research. Or maybe, it was my eagerness to document and write processes for my student teams in university. Either way, I had always hoped to find work which allowed me to use this natural skill.

What others found tedious and boring, I found comforting and relaxing. But I could hardly say it is "fun" - for you, the reader, anyways.

Writing documents is a form of art itself. Anyone who has read "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" would understand - I'm not a technical writer, Im someone who applies language the same way a mathematician applies symbols to graph shapes.

Everyone knows writing is a skill, and art and a work of passion. Writing is not easy, and its in the difficulty of writing that beauty is formed. It is in struggling to write, churning through hundreds of words and re-writing sentences over and over again that we write something worth reading.

I do digress, some of my work on this website was started with AI, I often use Claude to help me think up fun things to write because my own style of writing is technical, terse and to the point. Not really "fun" or "light" reading.

What I want to talk about today is the skill of technical writing, but its also about the innate structure within it. A well written, well structured document is like staring at a tessellation - a perfect and complex geometric shape. Look at the images below, they are all pattens and unique. They have structure, flow, form, and they tell a story. Just like anything worth knowing, or reading, seeing or feeling it has all the elements of beauty.

Technical writing, too, can have these elements, if we decide to be patient and thoughtful.

In my opinion, technical writing has all the components that mathematicians and philosopher would consider beautiful. Within the terse, straightforward language is a shape built entirely with language and then formed into the physical world through our words and our minds - just like any other art. Or should I say, just like any other well-engineered thing. Much research has been done on language, sounds, their association with shapes and other things so I'll just leave you with Bouba and Kiki below.

Why does Bouba fit the shoft looking shape and Kiki fit the sharp shape so well? That is for you to ponder…

My journey as a writer has come from a scientific approach. I learnt how to write through filling in lab books with data, forming hypothesis, and drawing conclusions. I struggled a lot with creative writing as a child, but loved to read. I was imaginative and artistic, but not when it came to the paper and pencil. My skill is in labeling the mundane, the static, the repetitive and the things we overlook.

At work I write a lot. Some weeks I could write 10,000 words or maybe even more depending on the project. The books I write are manuals, directions, processes and directive steps for people. See, technical writing is the art of getting into a workers head and trying to anticipate their thoughts. Through this exercise, I write processes for people, policies and even structure the management systems for entire organizations.

Thats why I love to read instruction manuals. Its the first thing I go for when I buy anything new. Theres no greater representation of the pinnacle for technical writing than a good instruction booklet. Truly, good instructions are life changing. They are intuitive, thoughtful, structured and easy to follow. Just like a good book, they provide enough detail to keep you interested, until you are done.

I know this is boring to 99% of the world, but to me, its something interesting and special. This blog post is a homage to the boring, to the mundane people who are writing little instruction booklets that most people throw away as soon as their item is unwrapped.

I see you. I read your work. I find it wonderful. Thank you for taking the time to make things easier for the rest of us.