Technical Communication Quotes

Incomprehensible jargon is the hallmark of a profession.

So-called "natural language" is wonderful for the purposes it was created for, such as to be rude in, to tell jokes in, to cheat or to make love in (and Theorists of Literary Criticism can even be content-free in it), but it is hopelessly inadequate when we have to deal unambiguously with situations of great intricacy, situations which unavoidably arise in such activities as legislation, arbitration, mathematics or programming.

You must learn to talk clearly. The jargon of scientific terminology which rolls off your tongues is mental garbage.

It is difficult putting technical developments in a language that policy makers can understand.

When I give this talk to a physics audience, I remove the quotes from my 'Theorem'.

I worked for three years in a small IT firm in Chicago. I managed our client base, so I translated into human speak for our technicians. But our company was sold, and the atmosphere and the culture really changed, so I quit without having anything else lined up.

We shall have a race of men who are strong on telemetry and space communications but who cannot read anything but a blueprint or write anything but a computer program.

I met a lot of hackers, and some of them were very arrogant. They thought I was stupid because I couldn't follow what they were talking about. But then I met this great guy whom companies hire to find their security holes, and he was very good about explaining so I could understand.

People who work in specialized fields seem to have their own language. Practitioners develop a shorthand to communicate among themselves. The jargon can almost sound like a foreign language.

There are people who do things in tech that have the same skill sets that journalists have. They write, they edit, they put out press releases.

I'm a good communicator, and I'm a good translator. I can talk to engineers; I can talk to people for whom technology is not remotely interesting or even maybe scary - things like that.

I was trained to be more technical in Europe because that's the audience. They enjoy a more technical style.

I'm the know-nothing. I'm curious, I try to be entertaining, I try to translate the techno jargon, but in the end I'm the audience's representative.

As software began to be sold to people who would never consider themselves technical, it suddenly became clear that you needed people who spoke their language.

The guy who knows about computers is the last person you want to have creating documentation for people who don't understand computers.