International Technical Writing Day

Today is a very special day for all technical writers! The ClickHelp team would like to congratulate you on your professional success as today is your holiday - the Technical Writing Day. Wait. What do you mean there is no such thing?!

Brutal Reality for Tech Writers

So many professions have got their holidays, but not technical writers. This seems to be unfair as user manuals play a very important role in our life, and there are a lot of people whose occupation lies within the technical communication field.

In fact, technical documentation is so crucial for our world that if tech writers disappeared, it would be an actual disaster. Read this article in case you would like to know what we suppose would have happened. We strongly believe that tech writers should have their own holiday! What day would that be?

Let’s Pick our Holiday’s Date!

We’ve come up with several ideas of dates for the International Technical Writing Day. All these dates are in some way connected to technical communication.

• August 7 - first, we figured that modern technical writing is closely connected with computers (duh!), so the day when the first personal computer was developed by Howard Hathaway Aiken and four other engineers in 1944 seems to be the perfect match.
• January 23 (the 23rd day of the year) - the modern English alphabet is based on the classical Latin one which has 23 letters. As letters are literary ‘writing material’, that would be a nice way to celebrate writing. Why Latin? Well, it is one of the most important alphabets in the history of human race, and many languages have alphabets originated from it.
• April 15 - the day Leonardo da Vinci was born. What does he have to do with technical writing? Well, the mechanical printing press was invented, the Age of Reason began, and those factors led to the necessity to start documenting stuff. And, Leonardo da Vinci was one of the most famous tech writers of his time! He was documenting all his inventions, and his ‘user manuals’ haven’t lost popularity since :)
• April 27 - the day the first typewriter was patented by Franz Xavier Wagner. This invention would later lead to appearance of modern keyboards - one of the main tools for tech writers.
• July 6 - the term "Industrial Revolution" was mentioned in writing for the first time in a letter from French envoy Louis-Guillaume Otto. The Industrial Revolution signified the start of the modern technical writing era.

Conclusion

We truly think that having a special day dedicated to technical communicators would be nice. If you have any ideas of your own regarding what day it should be, leave your suggestions in the comment section below, or let us know what you think about the dates we have proposed to you in this article.

Good Luck with your technical writing!
ClickHelp Team
Author, host and deliver documentation across platforms and devices