Women in Technical Communication
Women in Technical Communication, edited by Sharon Burton, was published by XML Press in 2026. The collection brings together essays from more than 70 practitioners — writers, strategists, architects, researchers, and educators — who shaped the technical communication profession over the past fifty years. I'm one of the contributors.
My essay starts in 1989, with a career counselor handing me two options from an assessment test: technical writer or industrial organizational psychologist. I picked the first, then asked what it was. The rest of the essay follows the actual work — documenting software through the shift from print to online help to DITA, navigating workplace cultures that ranged from collegial to openly hostile, and eventually finding my way to information architecture as its own discipline. I also write about what the early 1990s workplace looked like for women in tech.
The anthology exists because these histories have not been collected before. The women who built technical communication as a recognized profession — who argued for user-centered content before that framing had a name, who participated in standards development and tool adoption as both emerged — are still working, still teaching, and are due for recognition as primary sources.
If you work in technical communication or manage teams that do, this is the institutional memory the field has been missing. The book is available now from Bookshop.org, Barnes and Noble, XML Press, and Amazon.
If you're building or restructuring a content team and want to understand how the decisions your organization is making now connect to the longer arc of how this field developed, that context matters. I'm happy to talk through what that looks like for your specific situation. Book a free discovery call today.
