Know the Difference: Technical Writing Vs Creative Writing

What Is Technical Writing? Defined Creative Writing. Know the Difference: Technical Writing Vs Creative Writing.

There’s always someone in your circle of friends who would want to be a writer or an author someday. Whether he or she is a technical writer for a specific field like Psychology or Engineering, or a creative writer just like Harry Potter’s author J.K. Rowling or A Song of Ice and Fire’s George RR Martin, what a writer wants is to have his or her book be read. Perhaps that’s why a lot of them resort to online publishing via eBook conversion services!

But looking for an audience might be hard, especially for technical writers, because they may think that readers would find their works boring. But should technical writing really be boring and formal? Can’t it be as creative as novels, poems, or short stories? We may simply just say that the major difference between technical writing and creative writing is the way they are written, but surely there is more to than just that!

Technical Writing vs. Creative Writing

Creative writing’s main purpose is to entertain and educate the author’s readers. It has many genres and sub-genres. Such examples range from poems to short stories and even in novels and trilogies. We don’t have to read them and we surely won’t be informed of various things from reading them, but we still do because they entertain us. Also, skills and talent are essential in creative writing since these two are needed to write an effective creative piece.

Technical writing, on the other hand, is not done to entertain its reader. It is wholly written to inform someone. Some technical articles are sometimes written to trigger its reader to making an action beneficial to the one of the writer.

Can Technical Writing Be Creative?

Even though this may seem ironic, technical writing can be done creatively. But before that, what does “creativity” actually mean? Creativity in writing means that a personal touch in writing style is being applied. Doing so allows the author’s readers to engage rather than to inform, although it can be both.

Presenting a certain set of facts is the core of technical writing; anything more that becomes lost in translation, especially if the article needs to instruct on a certain topics. While anything less and vague does not help in presenting and supporting the facts and data that one wants to convey to its readers. In short, one needs to present only the essential words and phrases that support the piece’s main goal without adding too much or writing too little. Because of this, it limits the use of creativity.

But it doesn’t necessarily mean that creativity can’t be used in technical writing. With all the facts and data being presented in technical articles, readers may find this boring and overwhelming. And this is where creativity in technical writing comes in. One needs to be creative in order to entice and encourage his or her readers to continue reading his or her piece. Not only that, a technical writer must want to be able to translate the data presented into a usable and user-friendly document.

Although technical writing is done to inform its readers, it doesn’t necessarily mean that one cannot apply creativity, or better yet be creative, in technical writing.

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