Quotes & Sayings About Technical Writing

Familiarity trumps functionality. — Suyog Ketkar

Make difference with the uniformity; make uniformity the difference. — Suyog Ketkar

I'm not unfamiliar with music, and I really do write music. I've gotten a talent for it. I don't have the technical skills, but I do plan to learn. — Anthony Hopkins

Brevity is pivotal to clarity. — Suyog Ketkar

Forms of expression that unnecessarily specify gender are widely regarded as sexist. In technical writing, sexist usage is easy to avoid. — Justin Zobel

When I decided to stop using quotation marks, it presented technical challenges: you have to conceive of dialogue differently and structure it differently for this to work. So I had a new problem, which makes writing interesting again. — Catherine Brady

There wasn't much technical terminology, and then, most academics are not trained in writing. And there is what is probably worse than ever before, the growing use of professional jargon. — Stephen Jay Gould

All I can do in my writing is to stimulate a certain amount of thought, clarify some technical facts and date my work. But when I preach sharpness, brilliancy, scale, etc., I am just mouthing words, because no words can really describe those terms and qualities it takes the actual print to say, here it is. — Ansel Adams

Technical Expertise is composed of all the little and large bits of technique known to the skilled painter, musician, actor, any artist. He adds these things together in his basic presentation. He knows what he is doing. And how to do it. And then to his he adds his message. — L. Ron Hubbard

The design's intuitiveness is factorized based on the stored procedures: the more intuitive the design is, the more the users can remember and recall. — Suyog Ketkar

[N]o such thing as objective writing, ... every inscription, every traveler's tale, every news account, every piece of technical writing, tells more about the author and his time than it does about the ostensible subject. — Sue Hubbell

the focus one finds in the grammar books is on the wrong forms, on forms detached from the underlying (or overarching) form that must be in place before any technical terms can be meaningful or alive — Stanley Fish

The success of the documentation efforts lies in the users being able to correctly locate and use the resolutions to their issues on time and retain that knowledge for later use. — Suyog Ketkar

The fact is that as writers we need to make our
mark. But, to do that, we must help our words make their mark. It is that simple; it is that difficult. — Suyog Ketkar

This book reminds me of James Gleick's Chaos. The ideas and stories in Loving and Hating Mathematics are timely, interesting, and sometimes even profound. The authors, writing for nonspecialists, take pains to explain technical ideas in nontechnical language, and the book should interest general readers as well as a large mathematical audience. — Steven G. Krantz

See how God writes history. No technical knowledge is required; only a calm day and a calm mind. — John Muir

I can write a song in the back of the bus, where I am right now, or in my living room, and I can perform it that night and have an instant reciprocal exchange - an emotional, impactful exchange - and it's a less technical medium. It's a pure expression from my soul to other souls. — Juliette Lewis

On the technical side, I hope that my writing is evolving and maturing, ripening, deepening. — Jhumpa Lahiri

Users notice good design only when it is missing. — Suyog Ketkar

It [writing] has enormous meta-cognitive implications. The power is this: That you cannot only think in ways that you could not possibly think if you did not have the written word, but you can now think about the thinking that you do with the written word. There is danger in this, and the danger is that the enormous expressive and self-referential capacities of the written word, that is, the capacities to keep referring to referring to referring, will reach a point where you lose contact with the real world. And this, believe me, is very common in universities. There's a technical name for it, I don't know if we can use it on television, it's called "bullshit." But this is very common in academic life, where people just get a form of self-referentiality of the language, where the language is talking about the language, which is talking about the language, and in the end, it's hot air. That's another name for the same phenomenon. — John Rogers Searle

If, however, the poetic end might have been as well or better attained without sacrifice of technical correctness in such matters, the impossibility is not to be justified, since the description should be, if it can, entirely free from error. — Aristotle.

Physicists use 'God' as a metaphor more often than other scientists
especially in popular writing, but in the technical literature as well. Of course, this is just a metaphor for order at the heart of confusion. A rational or aesthetic pattern underlying reality is far from a theistic God. — Taner Edis

There were no absolutes in fiction, no certain way to deliver what was needed. So it was no surprise most technical writers considered novel-writing a gateway to madness. — S.A. Reid

We are driven by our necessities, which are driven by our situations, which are driven by our decisions, which surprisingly are driven by our necessities. So, what do we make of it? It all begins and ends with understanding the users' needs. — Suyog Ketkar

My favorite piece of technical writing: Assembly of Japanese bicycle require great peace of mind. — Robert M. Pirsig

I could name you a dozen superheroes whose powers I'd like to have. But if I could have any power in the world, it would be the power to read or watch a creative work and absorb the technical skill of the people who made it. Because then I could have even more fun writing. That's my core identity. I'm a writer. I just love telling stories. — Kurt Busiek

American radio is the reverse of the Shakespearean stage. In Shakespeare's time the world's greatest dramas were acted with the most primitive technical arrangements; on the American air the world's most primitive writing is performed under perfect technical conditions. — George Mikes

I didn't go to film school. My Grampa always says just watch a lot of movies. He didn't go to film school; he went to theatre school. It's interesting to learn about the technical side of it, but I think it's more important to learn about writing and working with actors. — Gia Coppola

"Though many painters and sculptors talk glibly of "going in for photography," you will find that very few of them can ever make a picture by photography; they lack the science, technical knowledge, and above all the practice. Most people think they can play tennis, shoot, write novels, and photograph as well as any other person - until they try." — Ralph Waldo Emerson

I write poetry. It comes naturally to me, but from a technical point of view it forces me to pay close attention to language and to scan. — Rita Mae Brown

When I create I don't think in technical or mathematical terms until the idea is formulated Musical composition is formulated in improvisation. Once a pianist like myself sits down and begins to play and start thinking about what I am writing all of a sudden a little tune will emerge, a little spot light and I'll go, "That's interesting." — Aaron Zigman

I suppose it's possible that a writer would have feeling for his characters, but I can't see how, because writing is such a meticulous, intricate, technical business. I wish I could say that I love my characters and that frequently they take over the book and run away with the plot and so on. But they don't exist. — John Banville

Writing is really very easy. Tap a vein and bleed onto the page. Everything else is just technical. — Derrick Jensen

Writing a first novel was an arduous crash course. I learned so much in the six years it took me to write it, mostly technical things pertaining to craft. — Rachel Kushner

So while we need to provide people with technical skills that will help them find employment, we can't afford to neglect the even more basic skills -- reading, writing, thinking, feeling -- that allow them to become fully realized human beings who care about the world they live in and the people who share it with them. — Paul J. Zak

I can't recommend technical writing as a day job for fiction writers because it's going to be hard to write all day and then come home and write fiction. — Ted Chiang

Technical knowledge, divorced from what it is supposed to be knowledge of, yields only the illusion of understanding. It's like being able to reel off the locations in a baseball field -- first base, second base, third base, home plate, left field, right field, center field, pitcher's mound -- without having the slightest clue as to how they function in a game. You can talk the talk, but you can't walk the walk. — Stanley Fish

There's more substance in my prose and my poetry than in all my films together. Writing is a more direct way of expressing yourself because, in cinema, you always have finances, organization, actors, technical apparatus and all that stuff coming in between. — Werner Herzog

Writing is not just the technical act of your fingers on the keyboard. Writing is living. — Melissa Marr

If we can get the design right, we can reduce the experiential differences between the first-time and the repeated usage of the application. — Suyog Ketkar

In a weekend-long lingual-legal rage, I composed a heartless, fearless, terrifying work of negation that burdened every person save myself with every conceivable responsibility and loss and risk, that in every instance unfairly and unlimitedly and gratuitously and disproportionately favored me at the expense of the world and, most repellently of all, that withheld the basic hospitality of writing: my disclaimer, as completed, was a graphic monstrosity, a cruelly rambling, almost agrammatical near-balderdash of baffling dependent clauses and ultra-boring, ultra-technical phraseology that enveloped the reader in a dingy, alien, almost unbreathable word-atmosphere offering barely a vent of punctuation, indentation, or line breakage. — Joseph O'Neill

I seem to grow more acutely conscious of the swift passage of time as I grow older. When I was small, days and hours were long and spacious, and there was play and acres of leisure, and many children's books to read. I remember that as I was writing a poem on "Snow" when I was eight. I said aloud, "I wish I could have the ability to write down the feelings I have now while I'm still little, because when I grow up I will know how to write, but I will have forgotten what being little feels like." And so it is that childlike sensitivity to new experiences and sensations seems to diminish in an inverse proportion to growth of technical ability. As we become polished, so do we become hardened and guilty of accepting eating, sleeping, seeing, and hearing too easily and lazily, without question. We become blunt and callous and blissfully passive as each day adds another drop to the stagnant well of our years. — Sylvia Plath

We are trained to teach users but are not trained to help them learn. — Suyog Ketkar

What politicians do not understand is that [Ian] Wilmut discovered not so much a technical trick as a new law of nature. We now know that an adult mammalian cell can fire up all the dormant genetic instructions that shut down as it divides and specializes and ages, and thus can become a source of new life. You can outlaw technique; you cannot repeal biology.
Writing after Wilmut's successful cloning of the sheep, Dolly, that research on the cloning of human beings cannot be suppressed. — Charles Krauthammer

I believe Jack Smith might have written THE BOOK on writing and revising for publication. Clean, direct, succinct
a book that is full of pure wisdom and truth, but also amazing technical advice. — Virgil Suarez

Writing a new play shouldn't be seen as a mystery belonging to a priesthood, but as a challenge, a technical challenge, just to get into it. — Tom Stoppard

I'll give you the sole secret of short-story writing, and here it is: Rule 1. Write stories that please yourself. There is no rule 2. The technical points you can get from Bliss Perry. If you can't write a story that pleases yourself, you will never please the public. But in writing the story forget the public. — O. Henry

How much ever we may underpin cognitive learning theories in technical communication and document design, the users invariably learn more when they are unknowingly
involved in the learning process: users learn more when they aren't learning. Conclusively, we must focus on experimentation and empowerment, and not on learning alone. — Suyog Ketkar

If I write songs and I think they sound good, then that's it. That's what I do. I'm not a technical musician, which is fine for rock and roll. — Creed Bratton

Contextualization lies in bringing out the right messages from the abundant content; in sandwiching the subject between the background of information and the foreground of its utility. — Suyog Ketkar

Keyword Winner is the most complete WordPress SEO plugin that exists today for WordPress dot org users. This WordPress SEO plugin goes the extra mile to take care of all the technical optimization. It helps you write better content. WordPress SEO forces you to choose a focus keyword when you're writing your articles, and then makes sure you use that focus keyword everywhere. Targeted keywords & SEO at your fingertips and less than 1 minute to research keywords & 3 hours to rank high in Google. We all need this product to achieve a better results. — Steven Walker

In the first 27 years of my life, I never had written a single non-technical word. I went to engineering college and went to business school. I never knew I could write fiction of any form. — Karan Bajaj

I don't like re-writing very much. The fourth and the fifth draft - that's too much like work. There's not much inspiration about it, and the lawyerly side kicks in - being very careful and somewhat technical. — Scott Turow

Heresy is usually quite sophisticated, actually has a meaning, and is to be taken very seriously. It is therefore to be carefully distinguished from turgid, pretentious, badly-written Bullsgeshichte, to use the technical German theological term. — Carl R. Trueman

Perhaps because of the special nature of the TIA, or perhaps because of the limitless human capacity for technical fascination, programmers have continued to hack at and develop original VCS games. There is a thriving hobbyist community that has picked up the Atari VCS, using and refining emulators, writing disassemblers and development tools, and even manufacturing cartridges and selling them, complete with boxes and manuals. This "homebrew" scene could be seen, strictly speaking, as continuing the commercial life of the Atari VCS, but the community is not very corporate. It operates on the scale of zines and unsigned bands, with most recent ROMs offered for free online - even if they are also sold in limited releases of a few hundred copies in cartridge form. — Nick Montfort

The time you spend honing your development skills, such as seeing patterns in code, refactoring code to be easier to maintain or extend, and writing tests does little to prepare skills in resolving conflict, establishing a team culture, or communicating technology in ways that non-technical people can understand. — Patrick Kua

As a technical communicator, I am an enabler of
information. — Suyog Ketkar

Early in her career, Muse engaged her skills for technical purposes, such as document translation and schematic visualizations for government entities. She continued to write and paint poetically, in secret, using her pen name, Muse. An inner compass is evident in her work. Pieces reflect both past and present dilemmas; while showcasing her victories in overcoming these obstacles ~ all from her faith based perspective. Light touches of modernism play hand in hand with old world strokes, offering highly visceral readings. — Earl M. Coleman