First of all… Welcome to the blog! I hope you will enjoy your stay! I will be posting about everything related to technical writing.
Despite being a rather niche profession, technical writing has many aspects worth talking about. To give you an idea, I listed a few example categories:
- Personal experiences
- Tips and tricks of the trade
- Documentation tool reviews
- Concepts of technical writing
But without further ado, let's get started!
Introduction
Hi, my name is Daniel, and I have been working in the technical writer profession for more than five years now. I'm purposefully saying profession and not just simply stating “technical writer” because throughout these years, I've worked with many things in this line of work that most people would not necessarily recognize as traditional technical writing. Regardless, it's been an eventful period for me, and I feel like I've found my calling.
I was always interested in languages and video games. This is why I first studied computer engineering and afterward started attending another university where I majored in Japanese. Since most textbooks we used were only available in English (Hungarian textbooks were quite lacking), I had to get further acquainted with the English language as well. Combining my love for tech in general and languages, when I first saw a position called “Technical Writer,” I decided to apply immediately.
What is a Technical Writer?
To provide a short description, a technical writer is a person who creates documentation. They can be referred to as documentation specialists, technical communicators, documentation experts, TWs, information designers, information developers, and possibly many other names. Regardless of title, these people ensure that information is properly communicated to the relevant parties, be it in the form of a PDF, a webpage, a video, or some other medium.
A single technical writer can be the sole responsible for writing documentation, or they can work in a cross-functional team similar to developers. In a technical writer team, there may be one person responsible for user guides, one for illustrations, one for editing, one for animating videos, and so on.
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| Image from Hannah Grace |
How did I become a technical writer?
I started my technical writer journey in 2016, fresh out of college, starry-eyed, and looking for a full-time job. Although I had some experience in coding, I wasn't confident enough to try my luck as a developer yet. As a Japanese language major, my options were pretty limited; I could either become a translator, an interpreter, or teach Japanese to others. The interpreter jobs available at the time were all notoriously difficult and paid horribly (similar to an internship: less than a dollar an hour for the first year, later a lot more). The teaching and translation positions were all freelance-type jobs, and I was looking for something stable. So the search continued…
I've come across a job advert for a position called technical writer, where the listed requirements consisted of basic tech know-how, fluent English, and some soft skills. Worth a shot, I thought. I applied, and after a somewhat lengthy interview process combined with some rather fascinating interview test rounds, I was hired. I want to dedicate a separate blog post to what happened afterward in these first couple of months, as I consider them to be one of the best parts of my professional career.
How can someone become a technical writer?
If you wanted to become a technical writer, you wouldn't have to worry about an extensive list of hard skills.
Although technical writers may need to pick up many skills as they progress in their careers, I would consider the following to be the absolutely necessary ones:
English (usually): As English is the language of computing and software, most technical documents tend to be in English (EN-US, to be exact). Because of this, having a confident control of the English language is paramount to success in the technical writing field. If you would like to improve your English, I recommend consuming all media in English, be it movies, books, news, videos, or anything else really. (Of course, any other language could work theoretically.)
The ability to learn new things: This might sound weird at first, but the ability to grasp concepts and pick up on new things quickly is essential as a technical writer. Why is that? Most technical writers tend to specialize in one or two fields where they understand the basics. They may attain impressive knowledge in those fields, but they are rarely subject-matter experts with related diplomas or extensive experience. If you think about it, I think it's understandable. Their expertise lies in using language to convey complicated information in a compact and easily digestible way rather than being experts in some tech field. I will create an extensive post about why subject-matter experts rarely make good technical writers. Because of this, when a technical writer starts writing about a new topic, they will have to learn about that topic in a short amount of time not to take up too many project hours. If you would like to improve your ability to learn new things, I would recommend learning about entirely different subjects in a small amount of time (for example, you could try learning coding and French, or history and math, etc.).
Communication: It's no wonder that technical writers are sometimes called technical communicators. Communication with other people, be it with customers, managers, or subject-matter experts, is one of the key skills in a technical writer's arsenal. Since most people consider documentation to be little more than an afterthought, despite evidence showing that good documentation means more customers, you have to be efficient in your communication. I suggest always having a plan in advance. Plan out the questions that you would like to ask from subject-matter experts or the speech that you will give to the customer, or your report to your manager. It's extremely annoying if you keep interrupting others with seemingly (from their perspective) unimportant stuff, so if you would like to become a good technical writer, plan, plan, and plan some more. If you would like to improve your communication skills, I would recommend rehearsing, going to soft skill trainings, and always planning ahead. I cannot emphasize this enough.
And that's about it. Of course, there are many other skills related to technical writing (illustrations being one of them), but those three are the key ones.
I hope you enjoyed this short blog post about technical writing. Stay tuned for more!