Mark Pilgrim: "I take in a lot of raw data, synthesize it, and spit it back out in ways that many people can understand."
Mark Pilgrim and Neil Deakin are two very smart web developers, but more importantly they both have the ability to document complex web technology in laymans language - so that wannabes can learn it too. This is different to technical writing, which means documenting a piece of software for its end users.
One of the best ways to learn something is to document it. The beauty of the read/write web is that it makes it easy to do this, and easy for everyone to contribute.
Revision 24/7/03: I struck out the sentence about technical writing, because tech writing as a discipline actually covers writing for both wannabes and end users - and many other types of audiences too.
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I beg to differ with your comparison of technical writing with Mark Pilgrim's ability to boil down complex tech in layman's terms.
Technical writing is not, as you mention, simply documenting software for end users. Although a significant amount of tech writing is in this realm, tech writing, as a whole, actually means documenting technical subjects so that one's audience understands them. You illustrated this in your quote from Mark Pilgrim and your subsequent compliment on his ability to document complex tech in layman's language. Since Mark's audience consists of "web dev wannabes" as well as seasoned web developers, he must put things into layman's terms if he wishes to be understood by as many people as possible.
By the same token, if Mark's audience consisted of only seasoned web developers (a much smaller group by comparison), I daresay he wouldn't be using layman's terms to explain his ideas. Instead, he'd be using jargon and other shortcuts to communicate, which is much easier and quicker to do than to use layman's terms.
Posted by: Jenny | July 22, 2003 12:23 PM
Yes you're right Jenny. I've been thinking myself about this post and how my definition of tech writing wasn't quite right. Not one of my better posts :-) You hit the nail on the head with this definition:
"tech writing, as a whole, actually means documenting technical subjects so that one's audience understands them."
Posted by: Richard MacManus | July 22, 2003 1:26 PM