Technical Writers Blog Also

For some technical writers, writing a blog comes as a relief, a sudden respite from the exigencies of precision and concision. Like when a tour guide goes off alone onto the less-trodden paths of her homeland, plunging deeply into familiar digressions of ambiguity, subjectivity, and multiple levels of meaning. Technical writers can digress too. In a blog.

The success of a blog lies not in its content but in what it provokes, because while everything on the surface is content, nothing being said is on the surface.

Thus freed from helping others to understand precise technical terms or do something correctly, a blog attempts to help people think differently and to engage them to say not only Yes or No but Maybe. Writing a blog can move a reader from one vague point to another, because life is the stuff we place in suspension between two edges. Before falling …

The blog takes its time because it needs space.

A blog gives space for the technical writer to embellish and the reader to reflect. It’s an open flow, where the writer can guide the reader into the same space as herself, or can suggest to the reader to go somewhere else. It’s entirely up to each writer and reader to define.

The subtext in a blog can be more present than the text, the surface only an excuse to engage. The words of a blog are sometimes opposed to their plain meaning. The writer can write with one intention, while the reader takes away something entirely different.

Developing an idea in a blog is far more important than completing it.

A blog is a collection of more than one idea in parallel, where each idea is a thread that needs space to move within, a space that resides not only in the text but in the reader’s will to invent and behold.

A blog is not technical writing. Which is good for both blogging and technical writing. 😌