So, I’ve been thinking about this for a while now. By ‘a while’ I mean ten minutes. And by ‘thinking’ I mean Googling. What’s the difference between a tech article and a normal article? As far as I know, nothing. Having written quite a few of both, normal and tech article (and pretty good ones, mind you), I can assure you that there is absolutely no difference between normal and technical content writing. Except maybe for the tone. And the research required. And the audience. And the purpose. Well, come to think of it, there just have some differences between tech and normal articles, after all. Let’s explore these differences:
The audience
Although there is nothing stopping anyone from reading an article online, the target audience for tech articles and normal articles is quite different. To be precise, the assumptions you make about the target audience, and their purpose for reading an article should be different. It’s like Nutella – although nobody is stopping us from stuffing a spoonful in our mouths and licking it clean, the manufacturers intend it to be consumed as a spread on a bread (It’s a bad analogy, I know). While the target audience for normal articles is basically anybody who can read, the audience for tech articles are people who know almost everything there is to know about something and want to know more. When you write a technical article, always assume the readers to have some basic knowledge of the industry you’re writing for. While normal articles must be written in a way that everybody understands, explaining basic concepts in tech articles is considered a waste of the reader’s time.
The research
The deeper the research, the better the outcome!
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While normal articles are not as research intensive, tech articles are held to high standards of factuality, objectivity, and ‘non-fluffery’. Research is possibly the biggest difference between technical content writing and other kinds of content writing. Like I said (or wrote) before, the readers of tech articles are usually people who know a lot already and are looking to know more. This means, as a tech writer you need to read more than your target audience. You have to venture into places no other mere mortal would dare to, such as the second, third and even the fourth page of Google search results (I’ve never had to go the fifth page, but I’ve heard terrifying things about the place). You have to read through different studies and research reports to find solid data that you can cite in your article. You’ll probably get different numbers for the same statistic. Then you have to decide between a source that says, ‘global mobile users will exceed 3.5 billion in number this year’ and another that says it will be over 9 billion! You just never know who to trust.
The language
The language, i.e., the tone, the vocabulary, the voice, and the preferred tense, is different too for technical articles. In technical writing, the tone has to be formal. Although you can try a few creative ways to make boring topics exciting, excessive humor in tech articles is frowned upon. The near entirety of a tech article should be in the active voice, and preferably in the present tense. Among so many constraints, the one area that offers more freedom is the usage of words – the sesquipedalianism. Normal articles, due to their need to be understood by everyone, tend to express even the most complicated ideas in crystal clear language that everybody understands.
Having said all this, I still think technical content writing is not much different from normal content writing. Ultimately all content should purport to be read and understood by everyone. A great article is not one that leaves the audience feeling dumb in the end, but one that leaves them feeling smarter. So regardless of whether you are a regular content writer, or someone engaged in technical content writing, write articles that make people feel smarter after having read your content. If you can’t, let a content writing agency help you.
