Technical Writing and Creativity
Can technical writing be creative? For the majority of people the word “writing” means something creative. But the combination “technical writing” may confuse people. So let’s make it clear.
Creative Writing
So what is creative writing?
“Creative writing is any writing that goes outside the bounds of normal professional, journalistic, academic, or technical forms of literature, typically identified by an emphasis on narrative craft, character development, and the use of literary tropes or with various traditions of poetry and poetics.
Due to the looseness of the definition, it is possible for writing such as feature stories to be considered creative writing, even though they fall under journalism, because the content of features is specifically focused on narrative and character development.
Both fictional and non-fictional works fall into this category, including such forms as novels, biographies, short stories, and poems. In the academic setting, creative writing is typically separated into fiction and poetry classes, with a focus on writing in an original style, as opposed to imitating pre-existing genres such as crime or horror. Writing for the screen and stage- screenwriting and playwriting- are often taught separately, but fit under the creative writing category as well.”
Creative writing includes the following types:
- Poetry
- Plays
- Movie and television scripts
- Fiction (novels, novellas, and short stories)
- Songs
- Speeches
- Memoirs
- Personal essays
- Blogs
As you see, blogs, memoirs, personal essays are also considered as creative writing because authors write about their life in a creative manner using description, metaphors, and other figures of speech. The piece of creative writing usually has a plot that should entertain and inspire readers. As an example of creative writing, I can recommend Amanda Johnson’s blog.
Now let’s see, what is technical writing.
Technical Writing
“Technical Writing is a term that defines written form of technical communication used in a variety of technical fields — computer software and hardware, chemistry, aeronautics, engineering, robotics, finance, etc. Some people define this term as “writing complex things in a simple form”.
Technical writing is done by technical writers or, how they are also called — technical communicators. This profession requires many skills such as critical thinking, writing skills, and many more.”
Technical writing includes the following types of documents:
The purpose of technical writing is to explain readers how to use a device or a product, what they should do if they face some issues and so on. So, documentation should not contain words that will mislead its readers. The language of documents must be plain, clear and easy-to-interpret.
However, in this article I’m talking about writing in general, not only about the technical writing job. Technical writing may sound boring but this profession is really exiting because tech writers not only write but create visual content, communicate with different interesting people as SME and so on. You can learn more about the technical writing job from the article named Technical Writer Job Scope: What Technical Writers Really Do.
What do you think? Can technical writing be creative?