I really need a holodeck. Installed in my basement, this pixelated artificial reality could host an exact replica of myself to watch the baby all day, while I wrote and got work done. I could cook exotic meals – which contained no calories – and never have to clean up the mess. My old dog would be forever young. And my husband would look like the guy on the cover of a romance novel. (It’s not cheating if the character still has his face, is it?)

It’s tough to watch Star Trek without the tech writer in me wondering, “Who is writing all those user manuals for all that cool stuff?” On the show, when there is a system failure, Chief Engineer Geordi LaForge is always standing by with the answer we all want to hear. His staff is eager and well-trained to handle any emergency. He’s amazing! Everybody loves him and they can’t live without him… then I remember that Geordie works for free.

All too often the answer to the question of who is writing the manuals, is that nobody is writing the manuals. There either isn’t a manual at all, or there is a limp attempt at a website full of broken links, telephone numbers that connect to call centres overseas, or (every tech writer’s personal favourite,) a badly translated sheet of instructions printed on thin paper, without illustrations.

Nobody asks what the cost of the problem of insufficient documentation is, or who foots that bill. It’s a much bigger bill than the one for writing services, believe me. When a consumer has no reference for parts, support, or even worse, has unclear information, products get returned to retailers, and in turn to distributors and manufacturers. Plain and simple. (There goes my DIY holodeck, right back to the Future Shop returns counter.) Consumer confidence is reduced, sales drop off, layoffs happen, and more marketing dollars are wasted on the next insufficient effort.

An associate recently came to me with a dilemma: a software company who had contracted him to market their products had several thousand pieces of software sitting in a distributor’s warehouse. It had been sold to a major retailer, who had placed it on their shelves, sold a few units, and then returned what didn’t sell to the distributor. The software company has not been paid for the products (shipped in fall 2006), and the distributor wants it out of their warehouse. My friend is trying to find a way to “dump” the product for as little as a dollar a unit. At this point, the software company has the philosophy that anything is better than crushing it for landfill.

The reason this product didn’t sell? It can be summed up in two words: bad communication. The consumer who saw it on the shelf didn’t understand what the product was, and why it was better than any other competitor. The buyer at the retailer bought too many units because he didn’t understand the product’s positioning. The manufacturer didn’t understand that his target market wasn’t the guy who shops at that store. The packaging designer didn’t understand what the message of the product should have been. And now, somebody at the top is losing a major chunk of cash.

It’s not always visible, but this is extremely frustrating to company owners. They are all on tight budgets, no matter how much money a company has, because nobody wants to part with cash they worked hard to get. No matter what they say, the owners of companies really want everyone they hire to help them sell their product. For this reason, they find it difficult to justify the hiring of a “writer”, when what they really need is a sales system that works.

Starting with the conception of the product, the job of the technical writer is often to act as a technical “translater”, which facilitates the selling of the product. Research is done in partnership with marketing to determine the target market, their buying habits, the competitors, etc., This is presented to the developers of the product, and to the sales reps, the distributors, and the graphic designer. It all works together to communicate the same thing: Here I am, and this is why you need me!