Deirdre P. Doyle, Technical Editor at JG Communication, says: “Simplicity, consistency and caring about your readers is the best way to communicate technical and scientific information, to develop a relationship with your target audience and build trust in the content you create.”

There are many ways to move the hearts and minds of people, and if you can do this with your customers the natural outcome is a boost in your bottom line. When it comes to creating thought leadership, developing trust, and being the market leader, a tone of voice is a great way to create simplicity, be consistent, and build that trust. A tone that conveys authority and expertise without talking down to your readers and without trying to sell will help your readers believe in you – don’t be a schoolmaster, nor a pejorative buffoon, be a wise owl and a caretaker.

Technical concepts can be hard to understand, as they are not just complex in their own right, they are complex as a result of the world we live in. Describing technical solutions in such a way that readers across the globe will understand is challenging, but is a great return on investment for those who do it well.

Long form technical articles and papers tend to have specific target audiences, which are often smaller and more niched than the general audience for corporate communications – both the length and technical complexity of a piece of content are inversely proportional to the size of its audience. Bite-sized content of 140 characters can reach a much wider audience than a 4,000 word piece on, say, the ability of string theory to describe the universe. Tone of voice helps to communicate with a chosen audience in a way that speaks to them on their level.

Engineers are not linguists and likewise, linguists are not engineers. The gap in between these two professions is where the difficulty with communicating technical content often lies.

Engineers deal in facts, but lists of facts don’t make for interesting stories that potential customers want to read. Engineers are not renowned for being experts on expressing their ideas succinctly. On the other hand, technically minded people generally possess a valuable attribute: that of being totally passionate about what they do. That passion is the fabric from which facts in their raw state translate into interesting stories and how your audience becomes just as excited about the technology as the engineers who created it. If you can do this often enough and consistently enough, your target audience will become your customers.

Protecting intellectual property rights has played a significant role in how technical expertise should be published. This, however, is changing. On the one hand, there is even greater emphasis on security and protecting innovation today, but on the other, thought leadership has proven to be an extremely powerful tool for building brand value.