During a networking session at the 9th International Conference on Technical Communication: Evolutions of the Discipline, we asked attendees to discuss what brings technical communicators together. This is what they said.

Community

The struggle ! 😉

Joining professional organizations such as the STC.

Team cohesiveness

Newsletters, meetings

A shared sense of community as we are a reduced group of professionals

Culture of humanities

Background

Many of us come from different backgrounds such as language, art, archeology. Surprisingly few have engineering or technical backgrounds.

Love for languages

Interest in words

Common desire for understanding and sharing

Knowing how to structure ideas

Love for knowledge, desire to share knowledge/access info

Love of communication

Love for knowledge

Tech writers share the same goal, to bring the information in a way that is accesible to certain audiences.

Technical writers are some sort of teachers as we have to convey info

“All of us share the same goal: to simplify the complex matters – adapt to the audience – being accessible/understandable”

Empathy, caring for others

User-centric approach

Empathy

Tools and techniques

Using different kinds of technology to communicate with our end-users,

Curiosity and continuous learning

Update and progress made in technical communication

Great to share ideas and compare the ways of working with non-writers (in my case, software developers & engineers).

Professional Weaknesses and Strengths sharing

To discuss new and emerging trends

Meta reflections, continuous improvement, interest for processes and optimization

Mediation

Technical communicators stand at the intersection between an object/a product/content and the users. They’re some sort of “unifying mediators”/translators between various worlds/moderators or translators of different cultures, popularizing bribes of info, making them accessible to different audiences by adapting your writing.

Bringing people together: helping collaboration, understanding, and knowledge sharing

Being generalists in a specialized world

We also feel the need to see a broader perspective of communication of information