What Exactly Is Technical Documentation?
Saturday, April 3rd, 2010The use of Technical Documentationcan be dated back as far as the days of the Mesopotamians. In their time they would use clay that they would form into tablets and take a sharp object to record their information. Later they would bake the tablets and store them until they were needed again. The Egyptians would use ink and papyrus to record a variety of important things to their civilization that would be then rolled up to make scrolls. These scrolls were written by specialized scribes and then stored away for later use.
Documentation today is only different in the fact that there is just an abundance of technology that needs to be recorded. The documentation is a process of explaining technology to a particular group of people. Not everyone needs the same type of technical documentation. It all depends upon what technology they are dealing with.
Even though technical documentation is still written on paper and distributed in books and manuals, it is becoming popular to also create and store these documents on desk top computers, laptops and PDAs.
Technical documents are used for many, many things, they come in extremely handy for legal issues where evidence is gathered and put onto documents for criminal and civil cases in court. There are also special documentation that is compiled and explained by forensic personnel and scientists.
It is important that no matter what the documentation is used for, the writer of the documentation must be reliable and believable. People need to be able to feel they can trust the writer as a good source of information. If a technical writer is trusted it will be easier for those reading or hearing the information to believe it and be persuaded.
This type of documentation is information that when presented in a particular way, will help people who have read it to either solve a problem or to be able to learn how to do something they did not know how to do before. This information can be found in the form of web content, printed manuals, proposals, a variety of different types of lab reports, newsletter and anything else that needs some sort of instruction or guidance.
This type of documentation in the United States has a variety of meanings and uses, however; in Great Britain for instance this type of documentation relates only to scientific and technological topics only.
With so much variety of technical documentation in the U. S., you will find documents targeted at the consumers as well as those in positions that require special instruction such as service techs, sales people, installers and many other types of personnel that benefit from such instructional information.
Writers who compile technical information on company products that are sold to the consumer are sometimes considered the mediator between the consumer and the company that manufactured the product.
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