The Need to Prioritize Empathy
By focusing on the experience of the audience and the overall impact of the final message, technical writers can create documents that deliver impactful and long-lasting impressions. Through proper research and execution, technical writers can combine all of the necessary engineering aspects of technical writing: heading hierarchies, document formatting, and style corrections, with the advancements of empathetic writing: inclusive language, disability advocacy, and advocacy outreach, into highly successful documents.
Readers from all groups can feel the impacts of empathy in a technical writer's work. In the article,
"How Minority Consumers Use Targeted Advertising as Pathways to Self-Empowerment," a survey example showed the ways in which minority groups navigated the internet and shaped their identities around the words that were used for them in digital advertising. There is an established understanding that language choice is absolutely crucial in technical writing, but it is clearly outlined that this is never more important than when writing is attempting to reference or reach out to marginalized groups. This survey shows the impact that branding and language use can have on an individual's time navigating the internet, as well as their choices in the media they consume.
The Impact of Empathy
Empathetic writing is actively sought out and chosen by audience groups who have learned to understand the attention and care that goes into an empathetic document. Many technical writers often feel that choosing to switch to this type of language structure will make their text convoluted or less succinct; however, simple changes with inclusive language can add significant impact. The figure below demonstrates some word choice changes that can be made to show empathy to the LGBTQ community and shows how simple these changes can be:
Simple changes like these are available for nearly all marginalized groups. Even the more general public can find community through empathetic writing due to the understanding that the technical writer actively chose to be inclusive and kind in their document creation. In an ever-changing world, this language is becoming more and more common, at the same time that it is becoming more and more endangered, and it is the responsibility of ethical technical writers to preserve and protect the language of the people through empathetic writing.