Technical communication strives to convey information in ways to best help the reader, whether a jet-engine mechanic with manual in hand, a physicist reading a peer-reviewed article, or the new owner of the latest computer or coffeepot. Ideally, it presents information that people will read, understand, and find interesting. "Just writing a document isn’t enough to ensure that people will read it. Reading is a voluntary act; people don’t have to do it," says Janice C. Redish in "Understanding Readers" (15). She and other academics endeavor to improve the field, recording their efforts in such publications as the Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, Technical Communication, Technical Communication Quarterly, and Techniques for Technical Communicators. The hybrid discipline has tapped other fields to further its goals of readability and comprehension, from psychology to computer science. Technical communication could also draw from another field, journalism, which uses story structure and writing styles that readers everywhere are familiar with. And journalism is adept at adapting to an array of audiences.

Like technical communication, journalism has countless practitioners and a crucial role. It enhances our lives, with newspapers, magazines, radio, television, and the Web, informing us on everything from a local school-board vote to Central Asia politics.

Journalism encompasses many techniques. A basic one used to structure articles is called the "inverted pyramid," which has a long history. It simply means that a story begins with the most important facts, with the rest in descending order of importance. The first article employing this technique probably dates back to April 15, 1865, in the New York Herald , says David T.Z. Mindich (70): "This evening at about 9:30 p.m., at Ford’s Theatre, the President, while sitting in his private box with Mrs. Lincoln, Mrs. Harris and Major Rathburn, was shot by an assassin, who suddenly entered the box and approached behind the president."

The long-time use of the inverted pyramid has led readers to expect to find the essence of the story at the beginning. This allows them to read a few paragraphs to get some information and to decide whether to keep reading the article or move on to another. It lets someone, for example, quickly scan the front page of a newspaper to decide which articles to delve into. Employing the inverted pyramid where appropriate in technical communications could tap that familiarity.

In terms of writing, journalism places tremendous emphasis on a clean style, using the active voice and shunning passive prose. The use of anecdotes and observations helps support information being presented, enlivening any lifeless facts. Metaphors not only make for good writing, but they are also crucial for comprehension, especially of difficult concepts. Liliane Papin writes of metaphors in physics, such as black holes, curved space, and massless particles: "Physicists often ask the same questions as poets, writers, and literary critics do. In their research and ‘thought experiments,’ they have encountered, confronted, and probed the process of metaphor" (1254). Most technical communicators do not have to wrestle with such difficult concepts, but effective metaphors can crystallize ideas for readers.

More broadly, journalists include people in their writing, whether by quoting them or profiling them. People like to read about other people, to see who did what and how, be it a political machination or a scientific discovery. Technical communication is less personal. But could a technical document contain some glimpses of, for instance, an inventor of a new lab machine, the thoughts that went into designing an interface, or those who would benefit from a new medical device? Certainly these would just be asides to the core of any technical document, but they could be brief enough to not only spark interest -- and further reading -- but give readers some background on what they are reading. Imagine a question-and-answer interview with a Nobel laureate appearing in a highly regarded journal. It may seem out of place, but it would offer a fascinating look into how a genius approaches problems.

A goal of journalists is to write something that people will talk about, what some informally call the "elbow nudger." That is, an article that grabs someone’s attention enough that they nudge the person next to them to share the information. Technical documents won’t quite reach that level of interest. But to at least try could help draw in the reader.

George Orwell, a professional journalist, provides suggestions that apply equally to any form of writing in his 1946 essay, "Politics and the English Language": "A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?" (5). His six rules serve perfectly as tenets of journalism, just as they could to technical writing (8):

• Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
• Never use a long word where a short one will do.
• If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
• Never use the passive voice where you can use the active.
• Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
• Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Applying these can help writers clarify both their thoughts and their writing, benefiting the reader with clear prose.

Merrill D. Whitburn et al. also address the use of language in "The Plain Style in Scientific and Technical Writing." Their article is a plea to move beyond the plain, defensive writing common in much scientific communication in order to better serve the reader. "Rhetorical devices do promote such traditional ideals in technical writing as economy and clarity. They encourage a student to be a more aggressive writer and let his personality through in nonspecialist communication. They strengthen the belief that writing is an art that can be learned" (356-57). Their ideas are what journalists practice every day.

The term "rhetoric" has been a term of much contention among academics. For example, Carolyn R. Miller says that "science is, through and through, a rhetorical endeavor" (616). Whereas Patrick Moore, focusing on instrumental discourse, says "The language of technical communication is…often sharply different from the language of literature and rhetoric" (107). Historically, rhetoric has been associated with philosophy and persuasion (Zappen, "Rhetoric" 30), which seem anathema to the ideal of impartiality in technical communication. But that sentiment has gradually been shed as academics note that a language stripped of all rhetoric would be one based on positivism, an outdated idea that is based solely on what can be observed (Coney 10), and empty of any meaning beyond what the eyes can take in.

To Moore, the idea of defining technical communication as rhetoric is an attempt to boost its standing in the eyes of academics (114). Technical communication serves many purposes, some of which require finely wielded rhetoric, but other times, more instrumental, straightforward writing, such as manuals for submersibles. "When the purpose of technical communication is rigorously instrumental -- to govern, guide, control, and help people execute physical actions -- technical writers work hard to make their language unambiguous, unemotional, and strictly denotative" (108). While Moore distinguishes between instrumental use of language and rhetoric, there are infinite shades in between, including one of persuasion, which may seem out of place in technical communication. However, it too has a role. For example, a scientist proposing a new paradigm for approaching unresolved data must be able to not only present the results, but persuade his or her colleagues that a new approach is needed.

Journalism, like technical communication, can have various aims, from a bare-bones iteration of an upcoming civic event, to making elaborate arguments. Journalists also must be judicious in their use of rhetoric, striving to present enough information and viewpoints to give a fair representation. That was not always so. Three cholera epidemics in New York City during the nineteenth century helped herald a scientific view among both the general populace and journalists nationwide, says Mindich. "From 1832 to 1866 journalism and the wider culture had moved from a religious and philosophical paradigm to one of ‘naïve empiricism’ and scientific method" (112). But the infinite nuances that words allow keeps journalism as much an art as a science, much like cartography in the Age of Exploration, as Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel note in their book, The Elements of Journalism. "Journalism is our modern cartography. It creates a map for citizens to navigate society. That is its utility and its economic reason for being" (164). Replace "journalism" with "technical communication" and the sentence still holds true.

Journalists, like technical communicators, must adapt their writing to various audiences. Most newspapers assume readers have at least an eighth-grade education and never assume that readers know the background of the day’s news. Freelance magazine writers must stay nimble, changing their style, tone, and vocabulary for whatever audience he or she is presenting for. Sometimes journalism overlaps enough with technical communication to be indistinguishable. The field of science journalism connects both, translating scientific and technical news and articles in well-written, engrossing articles. Scientific American, for example, serves a well-educated lay audience, as does The New York Times weekly science section.

Whitburn et al. note that "scientists and technologists need considerable practice in developing alternative ways of expressing the same materials" (353), whether it is to peers, the public, or government officials who control a project’s funding. Before the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, students learned to vary a theme in a hundred or more ways. "They strove to amplify their writing through comparison, example, description, repetition, paraphrasis, and digression" (353). The idea of matching writing to the audience remains timeless. Journalists do this when they write about quarks for newspaper readers, or tackle the implications of anthropological finds in a magazine piece. If journalists do not adapt, the audience does not pay for their work and they are out of jobs.

Walter Ong considers literature in "The Writer’s Audience Is Always a Fiction" to suggest that a writer’s audience is always a "fiction" created by the author, but one drawn from a long tradition of audiences from earlier, similar texts. "Readers over the ages have had to learn this game of literacy, how to conform themselves to the projections of the writers they read…They have to know how to play the game of being a member of an audience that ‘really does not exist’" (12). Journalism relies on its long tradition. For example, newspaper readers rely on a format that has changed little in more than a century.

The scholars Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford also address the question of defining a writer’s audience in their 1984 article, "Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked: The Role of Audience in Composition Theory and Pedagogy." They write that "it is only through the text, through language, that writers embody or give life to their conception of the reader. In so doing, they do not so much create a role for the reader -- a phrase which implies that the writer somehow creates a mold to which the reader adapts -- as invoke it" (167). They conclude that "a fully elaborated view of audience, then, must balance the creativity of the writer with the different, but equally important, creativity of the reader. It must account for a wide and shifting range of roles for both addressed and invoked audiences" (169).

Both journalism and technical communications must take measure of their audience. Journalism relies on the more informal feedback of letters, phone calls, and e-mails to editors and reporters. (The business side of journalism includes publishers and advertisers wanting to reach certain members of the population.) Technical communications strives for an empirical approach, such as usability studies. As Mary B. Coney notes, "For technical communicators, nothing matters more than audience" (5).

James P. Zappen takes the idea of audience further with the idea of discourse communities, such as the myriad specialties within science and engineering. Communicating across disciplines can be especially difficult. Zappen notes studies that "suggest the difficulty of building and maintaining a discourse community, of keeping the conversation going, across the boundaries that separate particular institutions…both from each other and from the public" ("Discourse" 6). His prescription is "to teach students not only to communicate within the context of several discourse communities but also, and especially, to develop the ability to step outside the boundaries of particular discourse communities and to participate in conversations with others on problems of mutual interest and concern" (9).

Another benefit of drawing from journalism is the familiarity of newspapers and magazines, not only in writing style, but in layout as well. As Redish notes:

Because the document is a tool to help accomplish the goal, readers want to find what they need in the document quickly and understand it easily. Readers actively interpret what they read, calling on schemata or mental models that they have developed from prior knowledge and experiences. Technical communicators can, however, improve the chances that readers will understand their messages by taking into account readers’ knowledge, expectations, and styles and by using techniques that have been shown to match the way that readers approach documents (37).

Journalism provides schemata because everyone is familiar with the style and look of newspapers, magazines, and nonfiction books. Maybe emulating those models when appropriate would set readers on familiar terrain, letting the navigate the information quicker and more easily.

Naturally, there are differences between the disciplines. Journalism rarely seeks the same precision as technical communication. Technical communication, for one, has a more theoretical model for its audience, which lies between engineering design process and the rhetorical tradition (Coney 6). Journalism has a less empirical foundation. Yet neither can afford to take audiences for granted. Good communications also reflects positively on the business producing them. For example, documentation support that’s poorly written, contains errors, and is hard to use will taint the user’s perception of the software, no matter how good it is (Smart, Whiting, and DeTienne 307).

One argument against applying journalistic techniques is that journalism is about what Redish calls "reading to learn," such as newspaper articles about city hall or an expose on the Vietnam war. Technical writing, on the other hand, is frequently about "reading to do:" "In the workplace, many documents, from memos to reports manuals, are used at the moment they are read to serve an immediate need. They scan them to find the critical information and to act on that information" (19). Redish also mentions some documents that fall in between, such as computer tutorials and user guides, which serve the hybrid purpose of "reading to learn to do" (7).

Yet there is also a lot of reading to learn in technical communication. People read peer-reviewed journals, proposals, reports, etc., to learn more about their field, their company’s research, and new technologies. And while people "read to do," there is still "reading to learn" happening simultaneously, whether it be the help menu on a computer or directions for operating the desk-size copier in the office.

In the end, journalism and technical communication will always be disparate fields. But those whose job it is to convey scientific and technical information might be wise to at least consider examining what the field of journalism does to connect with readers. Students of technical communications can take journalism courses to extend their knowledge, just as they would take classes in programming or design to expand their skills. There are journals to follow, such as Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly and The Journalism Quarterly, to understand issues and debates within the field. Technical communicators can read scientific and technical articles in popular publications to see what articles draw them in, which do not, and consider the differences that lead to reaching the reader.

Works Cited

Coney, Mary B. "Technical Communication Theory: An Overview." Foundations for Teaching Technical Communication: Theory, Practice, and Program Design. Ed. Katherine Staples and Cezar Ornatowski. Greenwich, CT: Ablex P, 1997. 1-15.

Ede, Lisa, and Andrea Lunsford. "Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked: The Role of Audience in Composition Theory and Pedagogy." College Composition and Communication 35.2 (1984): 155-71.

Kovach, Bill, and Tom Rosenstiel. The Elements of Journalism: What Newspeople Should Know and the Public Should Expect. New York: Crown Publishers, 2001.

Miller, Carolyn R. "A Humanistic Rationale for Technical Writing." College English 40.6 (1979): 610-17.

Mindich, David T.Z. Just the Facts: How "Objectivity" Came to Define American Journalism. New York: New York UP, 1998.

Moore, Patrick. "Instrumental Discourse Is as Humanistic as Rhetoric." Journal of Business and Technical Communication 10.1 (1996): 100-18.

Ong, Walter J. "The Writer’s Audience Is Always a Fiction." PMLA 90 (1975): 9-21.

Papin, Liliane. "This is Not a Universe: Metaphor, Language, and Representation." PMLA 107.5 (1990): 1253-65.

Redish, Janice C. "Understanding Readers." Techniques for Technical Communicators. Ed. Carol M. Barnum and Saul Carliner. New York: Macmillian, 1993. 15-41.

Smart, Karl L., Matthew E. Whiting, and Kristen Bell DeTienne. "Assessing the Need for Printed and Online Documentation: A Study of Customer Preference and Use." The Journal of Business Communication 38.3 (2001): 285-314.

Whitburn, Merrill D. et al. "The Plain Style in Scientific and Technical Writing." Journal of Technical Writing and Communication 8 (1978): 349-57.

Zappen, James P. "The Discourse Community in Scientific and Technical Communication: Institutional and Social Views." Journal of Technical Writing and Communication 19.1 (1989): 1-11.

- - -. "Rhetoric and Technical Communication: An Argument for Historical and Political Pluralism." Journal of Business and Technical Communication 1.2 (1987): 29-44.