Editing Technical communication (section)

===Determining purpose and audience===
All technical communication serves a particular purpose—typically to communicate ideas and concepts to an audience, or instruct an audience in a particular task.  Technical communication professionals use various techniques to understand the audience and, when possible, test content on the target audience. For example, if bank workers don't properly post deposits, a technical communicator would review existing instructional material (or lack thereof), interview bank workers to identify conceptual errors, interview subject matter experts to learn the correct procedures, author new material that instructs workers in the correct procedures, and test the new material on the bank workers.

Similarly, a sales manager who wonders which of two sites is better for a new store might ask a marketing professional to study the sites and write a report with recommendations. The marketing professional hands the report off to a technical communicator (in this case, a technical editor or technical writer), who edits, formats, and sometimes elaborates the document in order to make the marketing professional's expert assessment usable to the sales manager. The process is not one of knowledge transfer, but the accommodation of knowledge across fields of expertise and contexts of use. This is the basic definition of technical communication.

Audience type affects many aspects of communication, from word selection and graphics use to style and organization. Most often, to address a particular audience, a technical communicator must consider what qualities make a text useful (capable of supporting a meaningful task) and usable (capable of being used in service of that task). A non-technical audience might misunderstand or not even read a document that is heavy with jargon—while a technical audience might crave detail critical to their work such as [[vector notation]]. Busy audiences often don't have time to read entire documents, so content must be organized for ease of searching—for example by frequent [[:wikt:heading|headings]], [[White space (visual arts)|white space]], and other cues that guide [[attention]]. Other requirements vary according to a particular audience's needs.

Technical communicators may need to translate, globalize, or localize their documents to meet the needs of audiences in different linguistic and cultural markets. '''Globalization''' involves producing technical content that meets the needs of "as many audiences as possible," ideally an international audience.<ref name=":0">{{Cite journal |last1=Batova |first1=Tatiana |last2=Clark |first2=Dave |date=9 December 2014 |title=The Complexities of Globalized Content Management |url=https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1050651914562472 |journal=Journal of Business and Technical Communication |language=en |volume=29 |issue=2 |pages=221–235 |doi=10.1177/1050651914562472 |s2cid=110090911|url-access=subscription }}</ref> '''Localization''' adapts existing technical content to fit the "cultural, rhetorical, educational, ethical, [and] legal" expectations of users in a specific local context.<ref name=":0" />

Technical communication, in the government, is particular and detailed. Depending on the segment of government (and country), the government component must follow distinct specifications. Information changes continuously and technical communications (technical manuals, interactive electronic technical manuals, technical bulletins, etc.) must be updated.