Every semester, I have to stop my students when they try to go "you can just--" in my technical writing courses.

Nope. Everything that ever comes after that opening bit is *always* coming from your specialized knowledge. If someone could, they would've already. They wouldn't be asking for help.

And I get it. They're engineers. They *bathe* in their disciplinary knowledge.

But they don't understand--they NEVER understand, not until usability testing--that they've utterly normalized their special training and capabilities. What's utterly simple for them is a huge challenge for others.

That's one of the most important challenges in technical writing. Yes, you need to understand whatever it is you're documenting, but you also have to keep one foot outside the door, because the longer you're plugged in, the more you lose your sense of what's *actually* normal vs normal FOR YOU.

One of my favorite examples ever of this crops up every damn year: how to make *a sandwich*.

Yeah, you read that right.

Students pretend they're employed by Jimmy Johns or Subway or whatever and make training documents for how to make, like, a #5 or whatever.

Easy peasy, right? *Ominous laughter*

They go into usability testing expecting to breeze through. It's so simple, right?

And then their faces slowly fall over the course of the class period as classmate after classmate--college-educated adults--make the most bizarre mistakes with portioning and ingredient placement.

Last semester I had two student groups in two separate classes try this. Between the two groups, they had ONE, TOTAL, cleanly successful usability test.

Every other attempt failed.

Making a sandwich.

A fucking sandwich.

I try to keep this in mind when I write Stained Glass Woman articles, and I try to encourage other professionals to think about it too, when they offer advice to people outside their specialties about this-or-that.

Always remember: your perspective on what's easy is almost always wildly out of touch with the norm. The person on the other side isn't dumb or incapable. You've just got a decade of experience and a big part of you forgot or didn't notice all of the incremental skill-building that happened along the way.

@Impossible_PhD I run into this all the time in my meterology work, and when Im teaching, I always have to lean on whoever Im teaching to give me some insight on their own background. That way I can try and make comparisons or explainations that are actually useful for them, not just for me

@Impossible_PhD

Technical writing was easily the most useful 3 credits of my BA. Completely changed how I wrote all of my other papers for school and was a superpower in my desktop support career and then later as an intelligence analyst. I recommend the study to anyone who must communicate in writing.

@venya

Seriously, there's nothing that delights me more as an instructor of technical writing than when folks over on the STEM side of things tell me that technical writing is when they finally got the durable value of the written word.

@Impossible_PhD I want to beam this into the brain of everyone who has ever touched open source software