“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” —Albert Einstein
Technical Writing
Timothy M. Ponce, PhD
Teaching, Mentorship & Community Building
In addition to a profound understanding of theoretical physics, Albert Einstein also demonstrated mastery of communication. A truly great writer can take the most complex of ideas, break them down, and then communicate them to a wide variety of audiences.
This process of breaking down and communicating is what technical communication is all about. No matter what profession you enter, technical communication will be a part of your job:
- If you are a nursing major, there will be moments in the future where you will have to take complex medical processes and explain them clearly to your frightened patients.
- If you plan on being an engineer, you can bet that you will need to explain your ideas to both fellow engineers, as well as the general public.
- If you are a lawyer, you will need to take complex legal precedents and explain both them and their bearing on the case to a jury full of non-legal experts.
The goal of everyone of Dr. Ponce's technical writing courses, then, is to teach students how to convey complex information--through both word and design--so that a user can complete a task or make a decision.
For more information on the content of Dr. Ponce's technical writing and professional design courses, please see the syllabi page.