If you are fascinated by the art of writing, are a writer yourself, or planning to become one in the future, one question that has always caused many debates is whether creative and technical writing are any similar? Answering this question on your own is nearly impossible until you gain enough experience in the writing field. But we have you covered!
For our readers, we have asked a professional academic writer from the top essay writing service to explain this topic to us. Read on to learn more!
Getting Clear on the Concept of Creative Writing
As you can easily guess from its name, the main distinctive feature of creative writing is creativity. This type of writing goes far beyond the traditional areas of professional, business, academic, normal, and, of course, technical writing. Instead, it scopes a wide range of different styles and genres across both nonfiction and fiction realms of writing.
Yet, the definition is still pretty vague. Although we mentioned that it goes beyond traditional areas of writing, in fact, a “creative” can be called any piece that is original, expressive, and not bound by any standards or rules, but it should have a narrative and feature such literary elements as plot, character development, story, imagination, etc.
To give you a few examples, some types of creative writing are:
- Biographies;
- Poetry;
- Scripts and playwriting;
- Fiction pieces (e.g., short stories, novels, etc.);
- Speeches;
- Storytelling;
- Journalistic stories, etc.
And there are other types too. In an academic setting, a good example of creative writing is a personal essay. Thus, when students come to a college paper writing service, they often seek help with creative writing in particular.
Getting Clear on the Concept of Technical Writing
Technical writing, on the contrary, is very different. According to the definition by the Society of Technical Communication, this type of writing can span any kind of content that has one (or more) of the following features:
- It focuses on specialized or technical topics.
- It leverages technology (for example, help files, web pages, social media platforms, etc.) to communicate the topic.
- It provides instructions on how to do something, yet, it doesn’t matter if the process implies using technology or is technical at all.
Apart from these features, it is also worth noting that this type of writing has to be written in a neutral, clear, and direct style. And it typically strives to give readers an opportunity to use the obtained information for an intended purpose.
5 Shared Features of Creative and Technical Writing
Now you know about the key terms. Based on the definitions, it can seem pretty clear how different creative writing and technical writing are. But how are they similar?
Even though it can feel like there are no similarities, in fact, there are a few. Let’s look closer at each of them.
1. Grammar
First and foremost, whether creative, technical, academic, or any other form of writing – proper grammar is pivotal for all. Like students who have to focus on writing an essay and adhere to the basic rules of grammar and punctuation to keep their writing clean and error-free, both technical and creative writers must do the same.
2. Sentence Structure
Just like grammar, proper sentence structure is important for all types of writing, including creative and technical genres. When writing creative or technical pieces, authors have to ensure that every sentence is structured properly. However, it is also worth noting that both creative and technical writing allows the use of more rare, complex sentence structures. But, this doesn’t mean that they can be improper.
3. Clear Idea and Proper Information
Another similarity is that both types of writing require an author to have a clear idea and accurate information that they are going to present in their pieces. You can’t start writing without having a general idea. And you also can’t write without having some proper information related to your main subject.
4. Structure
As was already mentioned, technical writing must be written in a clear and direct manner. That is, it always requires having a solid structure. As for creative writing, we told you that it is not bound by any rules or norms, which means that the structure can be free. But it still has to be there. So one more shared feature is that both types of writing require having some structure.
5. Creative and Technical Ideas
Lastly, there is one more similar feature between creative and technical writing – you can interchange the ideas in them. This basically means that you can use creative ideas in technical writing, just like you can use technical ideas in creative writing.
The Bottom Line
When it comes to different types and styles of writing, their definitions can sound too vague for us to clearly see the line between them. The same happens between creative and technical writing.
At first glance, these two types of writing seem so different that it’s hard to imagine that they can have anything in common. But when you look into these concepts deeper, you can see that there are some similarities between them.
Hopefully, this article helped you sort things out and finally understand the key differences and similarities between creative writing and technical writing.