What is Difference between technical writing and academic writing?

Answer 1

Subject: Academic vs. technical writing

From: Chaim Chatan

Date: Fri, 27 Mar 1998 16:29:29 +0200

Since there is a discussion of the differences between academic writing and

technical writing, let me give you the perspective of someone who has done

both. There are very important differences between academic and technical

writing. One must also realize that there are also different types of

academic writing and different types of technical writing.

First of all, the purposes and audiences are different between academic and

technical writing. The purposes of academic writing can be: 1) to present

the results of one's knowledge, 2) to present the results gained from one's

personal research, and 3) to present one's point of view. Of course, both

technical and academic writing is laden with jargon, but the jargon is used

for different purposes. As far as technical writing is concerned, the

purposes of technical writing can be: 1) to teach someone how to use a

specific product or service; and 2) to describe the procedures that are

employed by companies for carrying out various tasks.

The audiences are completely different. The academic is writing to fellow

scholars, and often, depending on the journal or publication, to the

general public. The technical writer is writing to the user of the product

or the service, or to government inspectors who need to see how the company

carries out certain tasks. Users, of course, differ from product to

product. In addition, technical writing differs from area to area. For

example, writing documentation for software is different from writing

documentation for hardware.

When I took a technical writing course as part of my professional

retraining, I had to unlearn a lot of what I had been doing as an academic

writer. We are dealing with different styles of writing altogether. Also,

there is good and bad academic and technical writing, and a good academic

writer may not become a good technical writer and vice versa. I have seen

downright awful academic writing, where the author wrote extremely unclear

and obscure prose, and I have seen extremely garbled technical writing,

where it was difficult to follow the instructions.

The important variable here is teachability. If an academic writer who

wants to become a technical writer is not teachable, especially coming from

the academic and liberal arts world, he/she will not be a good technical

writer. Good academic writing is not enough--teachability is the most

important factor. One of the most important tasks of interviewers of

candidates for technical writing jobs, especially candidates who have not

had professional experience, is not just simply to look at the writing

samples of the candidates, but to assess how teachable they are. If the

candidate has both academic and technical writing samples, the interviewer

should be able to assess whether the candidate has grasped the differences

between the two types of writing. This is one way to measure teachability.

A bit of advice for academics who want to go into technical writing is to

peruse all the various types of manuals and documentation written by

technical writers to get a sense of what is involved in technical writing.