Owning Precisely (#33)

How technical writers lose clarity by owning the wrong things

The day started reasonably enough.

At 7:00 a.m., I was on a call with an engineering manager and a lead staff engineer, talking through the high-level goals of updating an aging API. We discussed whether the existing sprawl of .rst files should be consolidated into a single .yml. We sketched a rough order of operations. Nothing unusual. This was squarely in my lane.

At 8:30, I rolled straight into a content score strategy meeting. The stated goal was to increase product adoption. I listened, asked a few clarifying questions, took notes. Still fine.

At 9:15, a last-minute calendar invite appeared: a product revenue goals meeting. I accepted without thinking. I understood the context. I knew how the product was positioned. I wanted to be useful.

Later that morning, a quick pre-lunch coffee chat with a PM turned into a working lunch. I shared an idea — something a senior leader had mentioned earlier that day — about how the PM might expand the addressable market for his product. He was receptive. The conversation felt productive. Necessary, even.

By early afternoon, I finally sat down to write.

The task was straightforward: a process article explaining how to ingest data into a non-Snowflake data warehouse. A concrete audience. A known workflow. Clear constraints.

But halfway through the introduction, I stalled.

I found myself wondering whether there was a way to increase adoption through more persuasive framing. Whether this doc could do more. Whether the product was being undersold. Whether the introduction should carry some of the strategic weight I’d been hearing all day.

The writing slowed. The sentences softened. The clarity blurred.

Nothing had gone wrong that day.
And yet the writing was worse for it.

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Awareness Is Not a Single Thing

Technical writers are exposed to more information than most roles. We sit downstream of strategy and upstream of users. We hear about risk before it materializes. We understand consequences before they become visible.

That level of exposure creates a dangerous assumption: that awareness naturally implies responsibility.

It doesn’t.

There are two fundamentally different ways to hold awareness. Confusing them is how writers lose clarity without realizing it.