The Technical Writing Process
The technical writing process is not just sitting and writing documentation, it’s a more complicated process than you may think. Usually, it consists of 5 steps:
- Preparation
- Research
- Organization
- First Draft and Revision
- Review and Publish
I’ll describe all these steps and add some tips on how to make every step effective.
Preparation
The first step is preparation when a technical writer creates a plan. First of all, ask the following questions:
- Who am I writing for? What is the skill level, the average age of the audience?
- How many documents do I need to write?
- What’s the deadline?
The questions about your target audience in the most important because you write documentation for people. In order to learn more about them, you can gather a focus group, but first of all, prepare a list of questions about their age, education, occupation and what not (if necessary), this information will help you later. Or you can ask people with whom you’re working, maybe, they have already known their target audience.
Research
The research stage is about gathering information about a product. So, here’s what you should do: interview people who are also working on this project, reading information about the product that you’re going to document.
Organization
Now it’s time to analyze the information that you’ve gathered — divide it into sections that will describe the key points of a product. Information organization is essential, it will help you create a structure of your future documentation. But remember that it’s not a straightjacket, it can be changed and rewritten. Moreover, your documentation can differ from its first draft but it’s ok.
A traditional structure is a narrative structure that includes intro, body, conclusion. However, a process-based structure is more common in technical documentation such as procedures and user guides. In order not to reorganize your documentation many times, work with your subject matter experts to understand what structure they expect to get a clear explanation about the product and whether it correlates with the company goals.
First Draft and Revision
After the organization step, you’re ready for a first draft. The draft will be a base for your future documentation, create it as it’s comfortable for you, for example, you may use long descriptions, not formatted lists and so on, but then you should revise the written content wisely — follow all the technical writing rules like placing important information first, using the clear sentence structure, active voice and so on. To learn more information on how to improve your technical writing, read the article called “Tips on Improving Technical Writing”.
Review and Publish
The last step is reviewing and publishing your content. You can use these proofreading tips for technical writers to polish your documentation, use free grammar checkers or/and ask your friend or colleague to read and follow some steps of your documentation. After that, you’re ready to send your document to reviewers. When it’s ok, publish your documentation. But it’s not like publish and forget about that. You need to examine analytics constantly to improve your content. There are different metrics that you can use to see whether everything is going according to your plan.
Here are two articles that describe what metrics are important in technical writing and how you can use them in your working process:
Conclusion
This is the usual technical writing process, of course, it can differ from company to company according to their needs and goals. So, share in comments, what is your technical writing process?
How did I become a technical writer? What skills do you need? Read FAQ on Technical Writing.