Good evening, and welcome to Crystal Ball. Our guest today is Mercutio Hermes, who shares with us his view on Technical Communication in India. Welcome Mercutio.

Thank you. I notice you said "view", not "views". May I ask why?

Our show is about looking into the crystal ball. We share what we see there, and what we see is only a view.

So, you'll ask me questions, and I'll look into the crystal ball and respond with what I see?

Yes.

Great!

A couple of weeks ago, I met a friend from college. We met after almost 15 years, and did what such meetings usually end up in - reminiscing over coffee. Some time during the course of our conversation, the friend remarked,

In 20 words or fewer
Technical writing is creating documents that help someone install, deploy, configure or use a product or a service.

In 50 words or fewer
Technical writing is creating documents that help someone install, deploy, configure or use a product or a service. It results in the creation of things such as user manuals, admin guides, instruction booklets and help systems, but not of business proposals, white papers, case studies, and so on.

In 100 words or fewer

There's this old, wizened man back home in my native town. Let's call him Wajid Ali. He is the one who built the house that we live in. Why do we live in the house and not him? Because my grandfather owned the house and passed it on to his only child. Why did my grandfather own the house when Wajid Ali was the one to build it? Because grandfather got the house built, Wajid Ali was only a contractor who was paid to build it. At the end of the day, contractors do not own the houses they build.

Overheard the following conversation (not edited):
"You don't have to fetch the complete child."
"No? But the tree..."
"No no, send me all the children from adoption. I will build a tree and sort all the children."

If you thought someone was rounding up all the Oliver Twists in the world, and lining them against a tree to notch up their heights, you're mistaken.

It's a conversation between two techies.

So, the princes had spend several years with their guru, learning all that they could. Now their guru, Dron, felt that the princes were ready. But before he could pronounce them fit, he decided he'd take a test.
So, he located a tree with terribly high branches, and placed a tiny wooden bird on the highest branch. Then, he gathered the princes, pointed to the bird, and said, "I want you to hit the eye of the bird".

[Disclaimer: We shall not discuss the fairness of the test.]

It’s a few days into your new job, you’ve just wandered back to your seat with your coffee (you're still getting lost), and your team-lead says, "There’s this product that’s gonna have a version 3 release some time next month. Two new features have been added. Can you update the online help?"

Ho-hum. There’s already some sort of a Help, and all you need to write about are the two new features. That should not be difficult. But wait, consider the following scenario:

Someone asked me, "So, what are you?"

"A technical writer."

"Eh, and what’s that?"

I realised that the noun phrase technical writer does not in itself mean anything at all unless it is described through attributes. So, what are these attributes that describe a technical writer. These:

• A technical writer understands what is being documented. The writer takes on the role of the reader, and learns everything that a normal reader would know, or want to know. The writer has domain knowledge and product knowledge.

"It is difficult getting a bunch of hyperactive seven-year-olds to concentrate on geography. I asked them to name five Indian states and most of them stopped with Delhi, Haryana and U.P.", lamented my aunt. I looked up from the newspaper. She'd been handling the unenviable task of "introducing" the "social sciences" at one of the lower classes in her school, and today had evidently been a bad day.