Technical Writing for Business People

PREFACE

Technical writing is so important that in a better world, the people who do it would all sit on solid gold thrones being fed grapes by their grateful colleagues.

I’m only half joking. Technical writing is what saves companies from terrible mistakes and operational inefficiencies, from irate employees and confused customers. And it’s something we only tend to notice when it goes wrong.

One of my favourite examples of that involved a spaceship. The full story is in Chapter 12, but the short version is that a simple technical writing error meant that the two teams making a $125 million Mars orbiter for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) used different measurements. Nobody spotted the mistake until the probe messed ...