The creed of technical writing is simple: be aware of your audience. Technical writing is focused on writing for a particular audience, usually within some sort of scientific community but technical writing also involves writing that is in itself technical, like writing HTML, Java, CSS or other kinds of computer languages. Tech writing then, may be focused on design to help create and present a website that doesn’t necessary convey content that an audience will perceive as technical (so a newspaper’s website for instance contains journalistic writing for the user, but a great deal of technical writing had to occur to make the presentation of those articles possible).

Audience awareness is still important on the web as ever since the structure, design, and created environment all relay a certain rhetorical message to the user. Additionally, it’s more difficult with online documents or sites to guess and better understand who the users are and what beliefs they may bring with them as they encounter and interact with the site. As Selfe and Selfe note, “given this information, it is important to identify the cultural information passed along in the maps of computer interfaces—especially since this information can serve to reproduce…the asymmetrical power relations that, in part, have shaped the educational system we labor within and that students are exposed to” (432). As Anglea Hass would note, these systems would more than likely be patriarchal and framed around the ideals of a white, American male.

Obviously not all users of the Internet or other kinds of technology will relate to an ideal structured for or by a white American male, so the writing and presentation of these interfaces may benefit from being a little more sensitive to the audience. As Selfe and Selfe believe, “In general, computer interfaces present reality as framed in the perspective of modern capitalism, thus orienting technology along an existing axis of class privilege” (433). On the other end, however, tech writers and designers should not realistically think that there is a way to construct a document, interface, or site, that will address every possible audience member, and attempting to do so may be unproductive.

What tech writers should do in online environments, the same as they should with paper-based documents, is consult SME’s and ask many questions of their audience, especially when those two groups overlap. Subject Matter Experts who are experts because they are situated as expert audience members can be very useful guides to tech writers as those writers attempt to create culturally cognizant copy. Asking questions of the audience members also allows for better usability of the design; potential audience members or users should often be questioned at several parts of the process, not just prior to the creation of the document or thing.

Tech writers should not expect to satisfy every potential reader, but it is in the tech writer’s job to ask questions and try to best shape the document or site in a way which his not imposing the writer’s culture on other cultures or assuming that readers from other cultures do not have important views worth addressing. Since many of us are not out producing technical documents for mass audiences but are instead working as teachers with those who will go on to create these documents later, it is our responsibility to promote an inquisitive approach among our students with specific class activities that allow students to actually interact and question people who would use their documents or products and adjust to those cultural values as they find appropriate.