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Where engineering met documentation

In the nineties, technical writers in Belgium were few, and many of us worked alone. The Society for Technical Communication was where we met. In 2025 it closed.

Geert Valère AllegaertOctober 2026looking back on my years in technical documentation

Our debt and operational expenses now outweigh our ongoing revenue.

STC Board of Directors, January 2025

Nobody studied to become a technical writer when I started. You came from languages, from literature, from journalism, or you were an engineer who happened to write the manual because nobody else would. I came from linguistics. What I knew about the trade in the beginning I learned partly by doing it, and partly at the events of the Society for Technical Communication in Belgium, which I attended from the nineties on.

We were not many. That was the point of going. Some of us were the only writer in the company, sometimes the only one in the building, with nobody to ask whether a procedure should start with the goal or the first step. Much of the documentation was written by engineers, and at those meetings they sat in the same room as the writers. It was where engineering and documentation met.

A society for a job without a school

The society was American and older than the computer industry it came to serve. In 1953 two groups were founded within months of each other, the Society of Technical Writers in Boston and the Association of Technical Writers and Editors in New York. They merged in 1957, joined a Los Angeles society of technical publishers in 1960, and took the name Society for Technical Communication in 1971. The word had moved from writing to communication, which said something about where the field thought it was going.

By the early 2000s it had about 25,000 members, with chapters well beyond the United States. The Belgian one organised talks and meetings where a handful of practitioners could compare notes. In May 2003 I organised such a gathering: an evening in Mechelen on information architecture, the new discipline that many of us were then moving into from documentation. I invited the two speakers, Peter Van Dijck and Peter J. Bogaards, both of whom I knew from that small world, and the evening ended in a panel discussion. Information architecture is a story of its own, but the evening shows how the society worked: the field changed, and the members evolved with it. For a profession with no diploma and no fixed career path, a society like this did what a school would otherwise have done. It said what good work looked like, and it introduced you to the people who did it.

Alone in the building

The isolation is easy to forget now. A lone writer in the nineties had the manuals of other companies on a shelf, the style guide they had written for themselves, and very little else. You could not search for how someone else had solved the same problem. You found out at a meeting, over coffee, from someone who had already made the mistake.

The other meeting place, for those who were online early enough, was a mailing list. TECHWR-L started in 1993 at Oklahoma State University and grew to more than twelve thousand members: thousands of people who were each alone in their own building, asking each other the same questions every week. I was one of them. Between the meetings in Belgium, the list was where I could ask a question in the morning and find an answer from someone on another continent by the evening. The society and the list did the same job in two forms. One met in a room a few times a year; the other never stopped talking.

Where I met Robert Horn

It was at those meetings that I first heard of Information Mapping, and of Robert Horn, who had worked out in the sixties that a page of instructions reads better in labelled blocks than in paragraphs. I had been writing manuals by instinct. Here was somebody who had studied why some of them worked, and turned it into a method you could teach. That idea, and Horn himself, have a note of their own.

What matters here is how it reached me. Not through a course or a book I had chosen, but because somebody in the same room was using it and talked about it. That is how most of the trade travelled in those years: from one practitioner to the next, at the places where they could meet.

The end of the society

On 29 January 2025 the board announced that the society would close. Its explanation was short and financial: debts and running costs had grown larger than its income, and membership had been falling for years. A few days later, on 3 February, it filed for bankruptcy and stopped operating. Its last annual conference had been held in Minnesota the year before.

Why the members left is a question for people who were there at the end, and I was not. What I can say is that the job a society did for a lone writer in 1995 is now done by search engines, forums and open communities that cost nothing to join. That is a real gain. It is also a loss of something the free places rarely give: a room where the writers and the engineers sit together and have to listen to each other.

If you are the only writer where you work, this is what I would still do, society or no society.

If you are the only writer in the building

  • Find the others. A community, a meetup, a list, a former colleague. One person who does the same work is worth more than any guide.
  • Sit with the engineers. Their drafts, their tickets and their questions are the raw material. Documentation written at a distance from them reads like it.
  • Write your own style guide. Even two pages. It is the colleague you do not have, telling you what you decided last time.
  • Learn a method, not only a tool. Tools change every few years. A way of structuring information, such as Horn’s, outlives all of them.
  • Pass it on. The trade has always travelled from one practitioner to the next. Explain what you learned to the next person who is alone in their building.

Where they still meet

Much documentation is written by engineers again today, in the same repositories as the code, which is roughly where it started. The meeting I remember was not a technical arrangement. It was a room in Belgium, a few times a year, where people who explained machines met people who built them. The society that held those meetings is gone. The meeting is still worth having.

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