How has tech­ni­cal writ­ing changed in the last 10 years? And how will it be dif­fer­ent in the com­ing years? I start­ed to think about these ques­tions when an old friend asked my opin­ion about how the tools and deliv­er­ables have changed since the late 1990s. She was work­ing as a tech­ni­cal writ­ing man­ag­er back then and is now con­sid­er­ing re-enter­ing the workforce.

I see two notable changes from 10 years ago:

XML author­ing. Of course, one of the main changes in the last 10 years is the wide­spread use of XML when author­ing tech­ni­cal doc­u­ments. Two years ago, Scrip­to­ri­um Pub­lish­ing (http://www.scriptorium.com ) asked more than 600 tech­ni­cal writ­ers whether they write in XML. A major­i­ty of respon­dents were either already writ­ing in XML, imple­ment­ing it, plan­ning to use it, or were at least con­sid­er­ing it. Only 16 per­cent of those sur­veyed didn’t plan to imple­ment it. XML author­ing is not a fad. It’s here to stay.

Improved tools. I start­ed using FrameMak­er 6.0 in the late 1990s. Adobe just released ver­sion 10 in Jan­u­ary. Thank­ful­ly, author­ing tech­ni­cal doc­u­ments has improved sig­nif­i­cant­ly. If you dis­trib­ute PDF doc­u­ments to sub­ject mat­ter experts who make edits in the PDFs, we can now import those edits back into the source files. No more tedious edit­ing. FrameMak­er and Robo­Help can sin­gle source. You can ask sub­ject mat­ter experts to review your files via “the cloud.”

How will tech­ni­cal writ­ing change again in the next 10 years? Here are some edu­cat­ed guesses:

We’ll all be prepar­ing our online help for mobile devices. Smart­phones and tablets are expect­ed to start out­selling com­put­ers in the near future. More and more peo­ple will be using these devices to work and will need tech­ni­cal assis­tance. I expect this is the next “big thing” for us.

Cloud com­put­ing may change how we per­form our jobs. Increas­ing­ly, we may be stor­ing our source files in the cloud, dis­trib­ut­ing tech­ni­cal drafts using the cloud, and even author­ing con­tent using cloud-based soft­ware. See my relat­ed post about cloud com­put­ing.

Social media will change how we com­mu­ni­cate. In my opin­ion, most tech­ni­cal writ­ers are not tak­ing advan­tage of tools like YouTube and Twit­ter. But in the com­ing years, more of us will under­stand how to mar­ry social media and tech­ni­cal doc­u­men­ta­tion. In the April edi­tion of Inter­com mag­a­zine, there’s an inter­est­ing arti­cle called “Under­stand­ing the Help 2.0 Rev­o­lu­tion.” It’s worth check­ing out: www.stc.org. The edi­tion is free too.

These are some of my ini­tial thoughts. How do you think tech­ni­cal writ­ing will change in the next decade?