Tech Biz Writing

By the very nature of things a technical writer is rarely a competent illustrator. The converse is also true, but perhaps less so; some illustrators do engage in a cut-down form of technical writing when providing lengthy captions for their illustrations, or even writing a skeleton text linking their own artwork. Generally, however, the horses for courses principle applies and, in the course of producing a technical book, author will liaise closely with illustrator, and vice versa.

So the technical writer should understand the fundamental features of technical artwork, certainly to the point of being able to communicate in the terminology.

Here, we shall briefly consider the products of a technical illustrator: diagrams, line illustrations and half-tones. It should be borne in mind, however, that information technology has revolutionized the implementation side of illustration — the common use of scanners, and the ability to email illustrations as attachments, has all but made the old “paste-up” obsolescent, if not obsolete.

Similarly, producing artwork directly on-screen using CAD/CAM software or Paint/Draw programs is now almost universal. But the outcome for the reader, and the basic skills needed by the draughtsman, are essentially the same. If the student of this course is particularly interested in this aspect of illustration, a study of Microsoft Publisher, Quark, or page make-up programs is recommended. Here we shall merely define the object on the page, i.e. a circuit diagram, or flowchart.

Next: 37. Diagrams and Line Illustrations.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 27th, 2006 at 1:35 pm and is filed under Technical Writing, Business Writing, Publishing, TechBiz Writing, Educational Textbooks, Documentation, Photography, Illustrations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.