BBC Radio 4 is presenting a half-hour documentary on instruction manuals this Friday 21st August at 11:00am. One of the interviewees is Simon Butler, President of the ISTC.

A few weeks ago, the researcher working on this programme posted a message to a discussion list for teachers of technical writing, which was quickly forwarded to several other lists, and apparently generated a deluge of emails from technical writers around the world.

Technical writers everywhere are looking forward to hearing this programme – we simply don’t get enough exposure, and this is the sort of publicity that we, as a profession, desperately need. My belief is that the overwhelming majority of user manuals are not written by technical writing professionals. This applies not just to software user guides but to all kinds of instruction manuals, particularly those for household electrical goods. When people who have little or no training or experience in communications are given the task of producing user instructions they generally don’t do a very good job. Engineers of various sorts, including software developers, don’t enjoy writing user instructions. They think of it as a chore to be avoided, and if they can’t avoid it, then it’s something to get done as quickly as possible so they can get on with their proper work. No wonder so many user guides are so poorly written.

I hope that this programme will raise awareness that there is a profession of technical writing, and that there are professional technical writers who not only enjoy writing the instructions, but are actually pretty good at what they do.