I have recently heard people confuse the distinction between "outsourcing" and "offshoring." To clarify, outsourcing is when a company hires another business, such as Your Writing Dept, Inc., to do a specific task for them either because they do not have that talent in their existing labor pool, or they need to temporarily add skilled members to their existing team, but cannot justify hiring them as permanent staff.

I have seen many cases where outsourcing is a cost effective method for a company to produce high quality written material for a fraction of the cost of having a full-time technical writer. And writers who work on outsourced projects have the ability to learn how to work quickly and can expand the breadth of their knowledge and portfolios. To fully appreciate the benefits outsourcing a writing project can bring to a business, one needs to look at the overall costs associated with maintaining a full-time writing team that might sit idle periodically for no fault of their own. Look at it this way, if you owned a medium-size manufacturing company that periodically needs new user guides to support new product, would you rather pay a technical writer $60,000 to $80,000 a year, or pay a U.S.-based outsourcing business $3,000 to $10,000 for several product manuals?

Offshoring, while similar to outsourcing, is the hiring of a company, or an individual, outside of the home country where the business operates. For example, if a company is based in the U.S. and hires a company in India to develop software user manuals, they would be offshoring this work. Sure, it's also outsourcing the work, but careful use of the two terms helps define the specific benefits and downsides of these types of arrangements.

Frankly, from an American viewpoint, we do not want to see jobs taken away from people living in the U.S. So, aside from the emotional aspects of offshoring technical writing projects, there are several negative aspects to offshoring. One would be that native English speakers make better writers for an American audience. But, this is not to say that all Americans can write at an expert level. While labor costs can be much lower with offshoring, I have seen that costs can actually increase with the need to redo some of the work produced by offshore writers. Of course, communication differences and timezones can be a barrier to effectively working with an offshoring company.

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