That’s what you’re doing when you write documentation, marketing collateral, Web content, articles, or whatever your deliverable is. Freelance writer Bruce Byfield examines this in detail in a post on his blog. Admittedly, Byfield is talking about general non fiction or even fiction writing, but the lessons he imparts in that post can be applied to technical communication as well.

Byfield writes the following about his initial experience as a writing teacher:

When I first stepped in front of a class, I imagined that I fully controlled the experience. As a result, my first semester teaching post-secondary was almost my last. I needed to learn that, while some students wanted to learn, I needed to cajole or entertain others before they would even try to absorb my lesson.

Substitute readers or users for students and you probably understand fully what Byfield is getting at. The people reading your material want to learn — about your company’s products and services, about how to use those products, about how to quickly solve the problems that they encounter.

With documentation, you can collaborate with the user on two levels:

1. By giving users what they want in they way they want it. This could, for example, enable users to remix content to suit their own needs.
2. Initiating a conversation with users, and incorporting user-generated documentation, comments, and suggestions into your content. This could be tricky as far as copyright and licensing go, but you could do what Splunk does and use a Creative Commons license for all community content.

How do you currently, or plan to, collaborate with your readers? Or is this even in the cards for you? Feel free to leave a comment.

Related posts:

1. Using documentation out of sequence
2. Are we giving readers what they want, in the way they want and need it?
3. Managing projects and collaborating online