What the heck is techical writing anyways?

What exactly is technical writing/communication?

  • a form of communication through documents such as proposals, emails, reports, podcasts, computer help files, blogs, and wikis. As dietitians, knowing how to formally communicate with peers and patients through formal documents will be an important daily task.
Technical writing mainly uses:

  •  Communication that helps others learn about a subject, carry out a task or make a decision.
    •  For example, if you’re working with a patient who has Type 2 diabetes, it is important to communicate with them why they must avoid and incorporate certain foods into their diet. You may have to have your patient watch a 5-minute video about the science behind their food choices and how it can positively or negatively affect their disease.
  • Communication that reinforces or changes attitudes and motivates readers to take action.
    • As aspiring dietitians, challenges we may face are the patients who are reluctant to change their diet and mindset even after they have all the resources to do so. Communicating with them through inspirational videos, articles, and other success stories about weight loss can help kick start them on their own journey.
Why are technical communication skills important as a dietitian?

Here are the top 5 skills and qualities that I read about and determined most significant, and my interpretation of how they could be applied to us as dietitians:

  • Ability to verbally communicate with persons inside and outside the organization-
    • We must be able to talk with other dietitians and doctors to better understand our knowledge about food.
  • Ability to work in a team structure-
    • If you’re a dietitian working with athletes, it’s important to be able to collaborate with chefs and the kitchen staff to plan out what food needs to be made, when it’s getting served, and determine who is completing each task. In a group setting, it is vital that your team is on the same page!
  • Ability to make decisions and solve problems-
    • What happens if a certain diet doesn’t end up working in favor of our patients or as we expected? It is our job to analyze where things went wrong and work towards our next step!
  • Ability to plan, organize, and prioritize work-
    • We will write out meal plans, organize nutritional facts and data, and commit to our clients.
  • Ability to sell or influence others-
    • This is especially important when talking with patients about changing their lifestyle. It’s not always easy to change the mindset of rather stubborn patients, but if we are more equipped to inspire others, the patients will be more likely to start their health journey, knowing we are a positive shadow behind them.
3 major skills that us dietitians must have in common with our peers:

  • Ability to perform research-
    • In our occupation, there are always new diets that are trending. We must be able to not only perform primary research about the latest diets but secondary research (what other dietitians/professionals have written or discovered about the new trend). Reliable research would come from patients who have tried the diet, not just people who have heard about it.
  • Ability to analyze information-
    • What good is all this data/research from our experiment about the latest fad diet if we can’t comprehend the information? We must be able to sort through the questions, hypothesis, procedures, results, and conclusions.
  • Ability to speak and write clearly-      
    • Whether it is a presentation to your colleagues, a blog post about your favorite new recipe, or a day-to-day meal prep for a patient, it is important to always make sure that the information we communicate is always clear, precise, accurate, and revised. Having information that contains these qualities will make us more respectable and trustworthy. When we misspell words and do not use proper grammar on documents to our patients or colleagues, it could make us look irresponsible or lazy. Those are the last of qualities that we’d like to obtain! Always keep it professional.

That is all I have for you guys today. I hope you got at least a little bit of useful information! Til next time!

Yours Truly,
#sharingwithshar 

Comments

  1. Sam GrabelleApril 7, 2019 at 7:26 AM

    This is fantastic! I'm so impressed with your effort to relate to your audience and to find concrete examples that illustrate the important points.

    ReplyDelete

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