You’ve done the test work and engineering, looked at the environmental and permitting ramifications, completed financial analyses of the suggested alternatives, and quantified the risks associated with each. So why hire a technical writer or editor for the final report?
- Words have consequences. Crisp, concise language conveys a specific message. Poorly chosen words confuse and mislead. The quality of the writing often hints at the quality of the underlying work.
- Technical documents are often filled with passages of obscurity, ugliness, and verbosity. There is no compulsion to be concise. This dense prose needs to be unclogged by a knowledgable editor so the reader has a clear understanding of the writer’s message.
- By using a technical writer to prepare or edit your document, you free your engineers and analysts to do more value-adding work.
- A mining-specific technical writer already knows the proper use of industry-specific terms and language.
Why is most engineering writing hard to read? As former London Times editor Harold Evans states, “[Engineers] generally start out with good intentions, but something happens along the way. We don’t know how to structure what we want to say until we try to write it, and then in the gap between the thought and its expression we realize the bold idea has to be qualified or elaborated. We write more sentences. Then more.”
I would have written something shorter, but I didn’t have time.
Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)