Shanghai Tech Writer

A very long time ago, I started a series about NI Style Guide, our reference guide to writing documentation at National Instruments. I wrote two posts and never thought about the series again. I’m not big into style and I’m certainly not a grammarian. Matter of fact, as a technical writer who’s not entirely fluent in English—more fluent than most of my colleagues but not quite native fluency—I suck when it comes to grammar and style.

In our internal newsletter, we feature a member of the technical communication team every month. One of the interview questions is always about his/her grammar peeve. I don’t like reading this section because I’m guilty of breaking every single one.

Grammar vs. Style

Grammar is one thing, but style is something of a different nature. At NI, we have very strict guidelines on how we write documentation. We have to take into consideration everything from marketing to legal to keeping consistency across all NI products written by a hundred technical writers. (I don’t really know how many technical writers there are at NI. Just a lot!)

So of course we need a guideline to make sure we document everything in the same manner. That’s what the NI Style Guide is about. The guideline is several hundred pages long and I read through it twice. Bedtime reading for curing insomnia. Do I remember everything? No. Do I understand everything? No. Do I agree with everything? No. Do I make mistakes? Hell yes! All the time! Will I ever learn? Eventually, maybe in another few months or years.

Grammar and style can be learned, but only over time and with lots of practice. I’m certainly better than I was when I first started half a year ago.

We Do Not Write English

One tech writer from my team wrote in a post:

” . . . we do not write English at NI. What we write is an ultra-specific and precise dialect that I haven’t thought up a funny name for yet (but I’m working on it). This means that the English you practiced in college, on essays and exams and in emails to your professors, will not suffice. We have our own highly-specific ways of writing and editing documentation. Suddenly you’re presented with new symbols, words, terms, and rules in which those objects can, cannot, and must be combined. . .

To be fair, we’re up front with all this. We tell job candidates and new employees that the learning curve is high and it will take quite awhile before they feel comfortable here. We don’t expect anyone to grasp all our intricacies on the first day, or even in the first month. But I wonder if we should tell them that their English is only partially useful here — to succeed, they will need to learn a new language.

Indeed, we write in a different language here at NI. Geek speak, tech speak, LabVIEW speak, and NI speak. Everything but not quite English. After a while, we pick up this new language. We start to see it everywhere—documents, presentations, emails—and we get excited that we actually understand! Then one day out of nowhere in a non-work setting, we pop a phrase and all is silent. Then someone asks, “what language was that?”

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