Devoted to technical writing and technical writers

Conduct an online search for non-verbal communication, and you'll quickly find a consensus that most of our communication is delivered non-verbally, perhaps as much as 93%. That means that writers have the burden of converting the remaining 7% from spoken words to written words, and losing the benefit of tone and inflection in the process.

If nothing else does it, that one fact alone should wake us up as to how difficult it really is to be an effective written communicator, and the important role that professional writers play in today's world of IM chat, Usenet posts and E-mail messaging.

I'd like to encourage all of you to read Kathy Sierra's blog Creating Passionate Users wherein she writes about why Face-to-Face still matters! She references the work of Dr. Thomas Lewis, who has extensively studied and written about the biochemistry of communication.

As learned communicators who tend to prefer the keyboard to the microphone, we should probably spend more time in social interaction. I, for one, am definitely going to make more of an effort in that direction, even though it goes against my natural inclination to do so.