The Writing Process: An Overview

In the workplace, many of the communications tasks you perform are designed to solve a problem or improve a situation. Whether you are doing work for a client, for your employer, with your team, or for someone else, you will typically use some sort of design process to tackle and solve the problem. A specific design process provides you with a clear, step-by-step plan for finding the best solution for your situation.

try it

Take a moment to search the Internet for the term “design process” and look at “images.” You will find many variations. Look at several of them and list some commonalities.

example to consider: European Court of Justice Ruling

Here’s an example of the design process for technical communication, which this and subsequent pages in this section will refer to:

Your manager tasks you to provide a briefing about a European Court of Justice ruling to search engine optimization specialists who work in the field with clients. Your manager suspects that clients of the firm will ask about the ruling and she wants consultants to be able to answer clients’ questions with confidence based on the latest information.

How do you start and engage in the technical writing process based on the European Court of Justice Ruling example? You know nothing about that ruling. But you are a technical writer and writing about topics you may not know about is what you do. So, the design process kicks in. First, you research two things:

  1. Who are you writing to—who is the audience?
  2. What does the audience need to know, and in what form would they prefer it?

Once you have your data or information about who you want to write to, and what you need to write about, you:

  1. Sort it into categories—this is called analysis
  2. Organize it into a coherent message—this is called synthesis—and organize it to suit your audience, which brings you back to the beginning.

As you can see, technical writers do not so much write as compose documents, and they compose those documents to meet the needs of audiences, based on analysis and research. In the pages that follow you’ll learn about these elements of the design loop in greater detail.