Amruta Ranade, a graduate student in technical communication at Missouri S&T, has published an article titled “Writing for a North American Audience” in the May 2016 issue of Intercom, the monthly magazine of the Society for Technical Communication (STC).
Ranade is the current president of the Missouri S&T chapter of STC. She is also a Graduate Teaching Assistant in the Department of English and Technical Communication and has full instructional responsibility for one section of ENGL 3560 Technical Writing each semester.
In her article, she writes:
A significant chunk of the technical documentation produced for a North American audience is created outside the United States. I know this from personal experience: I am an Indian technical writer
who worked for American companies throughout my career. Overexposure to American sitcoms, movies, and other media has lead us—non-American technical writers—into believing that we ‘know’ American culture. Thus the documents that we create are based on the stereotypes and faulty assumptions about American culture. As a result, our technical documents are plagued with issues caused by a lack of cultural awareness.
Click on the link below to read the rest of the article: