LogFAQs > #930007075

Lopen posted...

In person you can read things like body langauge to intuit points of confusion, see where their eyes are focusing on their screen as you explain things, stuff like that. There's a lot more stuff you can process at once to determine where misunderstandings are or could occur.

Kinda. There's a "technical" body language that is very similar to technical writing too, which is very different from normal body language. Most people just use their natural English communication and it causes a ton of misunderstandings, especially in wide reaching situations like you said (e.g. engineers vs graphic designers, senior vs noob).

Learning technical communication, especially written, will totally transfer to in person. But no amount of chair-swiveling chatting will magically make you a technical writer.

But you did touch on the core idea with the point that people are usually quiter and more passive in remote. Natural English is reactive and conversational, but technical communication has to be very proactive. The whole skill is identifying and eliminating the ambiguities, so that you don't have to have the same back and forth convo with all 50 individuals on your team. It's the exact same activity as programming, which is why it's so mind blowing to me that so many tech workers hate it.
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_foolmo_
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