Technical Writing — Everything You Need To Know About Being A Tech Writer
In the last decade, we’ve seen an increase in new gadgets and software development companies as tech is developing. And that’s awesome news for us technical writers because we are here to help developers, as well as the marketing department, sell their products, tools, services, and software.
Over the course of five years, I’ve worked in-house and now, freelance, as a technical writer and copywriter for software development companies and startups. Over time, I grew to nurture and improve my technical writing skills.
Here’s what I’ve learned so far.
Let’s start with the introduction to technical writing.
What’s Technical Writing?
“Technical writing is a type of writing where the author is writing about a particular subject that requires direction, instruction, or explanation.
It’s straightforward, easy to understand explanations and/or instructions dealing with a particular subject. It is an efficient and clear way of explaining something and how it works.”
Technical writing is basically about writing user manuals and how-to guides.
It’s important to stress that technical writing is usually not your average marketing-sales type of writing though sometimes that may be incorporated in your articles and guides. This type of tech-marketing mashup is grouped under technical marketing content.
There are different types of technical writing.
One can write medical and scientific documentation, repair manuals, technical white papers and eBooks, end-user documentation, or focus on how certain tools work and even how to operate various industrial machinery.
Or, as I’ve already mentioned, tech marketing content includes writing well-researched technical blogs which, apart from explaining how the product or service works, is also intended to convert and sell.
What’s really cool about technical writing is that it’s straight-to-the-point.
It organizes the most important facts and explains complex problems in a very efficient way that’s easy to understand.
When people ask me what I do for a living, I like to make a joke and say I translate technical gobbledygook into plain English xD
How To Become A Technical Writer
Usually, but we see that’s not always the case, technical writers come from a technical field (engineers, developers, scientists, researchers, product owners, etc.). They are the people in charge of writing tech documentation since they are the ones most familiar with a certain machine, product or service.
However, today, there are way too many products on the market and developers or product owners, for example, have their hands full — they just don’t have the time to write complex 30-page manuals explaining how their product works. Not to mention updating those manuals and user guides when a new feature comes out.
So! If you’re a tech-savvy who enjoys researching, learning new things, pondering how different technology works, AND on top of that you’re good with words (great attention to detail is a plus) — well, then…
HELLO THERE AND WELCOME TO THE WORLD OF TECHNICAL WRITING!
Shall we discuss the details?
YAAAS, please.
“Being a technical writer means that you need to be able to break down complex information and make it simple.”
And I know, I’ve made it sound so easy, but yeah, that’s about it. There isn’t a Superman degree you have to possess when starting out. Sure, there are different online courses you can take to advance your knowledge, and you are more than welcome to find the best one to help you grow.
Remember: it’s much easier to teach tech skills to a writer than it is to teach engineers and developers on how to be a writer.
Focus on learning everything there is to know about the product you’re writing for and then explaining it to your target audience in the most coherent way possible.
If you want to get into technical writing, browse for any tech writer jobs near you. For starters, you can join a marketing team in a tech company and then later specialize in technical writing.
Now you might be thinking: “pff yeah, easy for you to say, you already earn a living as a tech writer.”
So here’s my story.
How I Became A Technical Writer
I gained my fair share of writing experience over the course of ten years, starting waaaay back when I was in high school.
Back then, I used to read a lot of Russian literature including Nikolai Gogol, Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
I felt the need to write. I felt that was the best way to express what I felt dealing with anxiety, stuttering, my parent’s divorce, my mom’s growing health problems…
So I just started writing in my mother tongue (Serbian) Dostoyevski-type prose-like diary content following one of my made-up characters Nikolai Iblisov. That phase really resembled F.M. Dostoyevski’s “Notes From The Underground” and “The House of the Dead”.
I used to write very dark, gut-wrenching, macabre prose texts about death, nightmares, my mother, and my character’s exile in Siberia. To this day I get chills down my spine when I read those.
I finished Uni back in 2014, but up until that time, I worked as a journalist and had experience handling social media and blogging. Throughout my university days, I used to scrape a living by writing about music — mostly music reviews.
Yes, that was before online streaming platforms Spotify and Deezer became popular so it was a nice way for me to get free albums and earn some pocket money.
I landed my first real job in the winter of 2014 as a journalist. They were this new Croatian media portal in the capital of Croatia and they offered me a unique chance to watch and learn how to be a journalist writing articles about the citizens and daily events in the capital region as our priority.
There my work consisted of community management, social media, marketing, public relations for the website, including managing the portal content, editing, B2B relations, and extensive networking.
I still remember the first interview I did. It was about street musicians.
Afterwards, I wrote different articles about the community in general, culture, and literature, about living in Croatia, then joined TEDxMaksimir (TEDxZagreb) as a team leader still writing music reviews for different Croatian music websites.
In 2015 I found a job as a technical writer in a Croatian software development company. I got to admit, I liked tech, and I was good at writing so I decided to give it a shot — and let me tell you:
It’s all about challenging yourself, questioning everything and learning how to grow in every way.
Digression: I didn’t give up on music. I published my own music blog.
Now, where was I? Oh yes…
I slowly started to learn on a day-to-day basis.
I got acquainted with SharePoint, Windows Servers, Citrix, Office365, SQL Servers, PowerShell, and terms such as server bottlenecks, server monitoring, server environment, SharePoint permissions, RD Gateway, etc.
Here’s an example:
The best part of working as a technical writer was that I got to work closely with product owners, the dev team, and product marketing managers — and that meant you got a chance to learn from people who’re in this industry for a couple of decades.
Yeah, sure, at the beginning, I had a hard time grasping everything they were saying because developing SharePoint permissions management and server monitoring tools is a niche industry, but hey — you learn something new every day!
You push your boundaries. You have to listen. Write down everything you hear, everything you learn, every phrase or term you don’t understand.
Ask your team lead or product owner to sit down with you for 10–15 minutes and go over everything that you might be having a hard time figuring out.
Be nice. Have patience. Ask for help. Ask for feedback. Learn some people skills. Develop expertise.
You, as a technical writer are good at writing, and yes, general tech stuff, but these people have years of experience in the field, and it’s their product — they know it like their back pocket. And after a while, you will get to know that product inside out.
It takes patience, skill, and most importantly stubbornness to never give up. Especially when dealing with tools like GitHub. But look at it on a brighter side, you learn how to use markdown and code.
I’ll be honest, technical writing is not that exciting. Sometimes it’s boring and tedious work so if you’re a quitter, might as well give up now.
*reality check*
Let’s face it, on some days, you will not be able to ask for help, and you will have to write something technical entirely on your own, with no help from your dev colleagues.
So what do you do?
Sit at your desk, panic and wallow in self-pity?
Of course, not.
You Google.
You Google the heck out the Internet, do you hear me?
You figure things out!
That’s what that brain of yours if for, right?
“Curious people are not only doing their job, they are exploring, probing, and chasing their curiosity in all kinds of places.”
It’s a process.
Along the way, you learn a lot about yourself — how you handle stress, master your researching skills, how you approach and talk to people, how you dig up everything you can find online and on different forums.
For example, I used to hang around (daily!) on websites where the company’s target audience was, and that was SharePoint Stack Exchange, StackOverflow, and /r/sysadmin.
This was really useful because I could catch up on trending topics, lingo our audience used as well as specific phrases they used to type in their search engines — that’s how you figure out their MO.
That’s also how you will figure out what to write about and what’s your next tech blog going to be about.
Remember: great content is about meeting business goals and supporting customer needs.
“There’s really only one central principle of good content: It should be appropriate for your business, your users, and for its context.”
Conclusion?
Research, investigate, organize content before actually writing. You should be more of a detective than a writer.
Who’s your audience?
The first thing you must do is find out who you’re writing to, who’s your target audience.
Write in a digestible way.
Present the information in the right order. Presenting information in the right order makes all the difference.
Read. Read a lot. Books and the Internet help you figure out the nitty-gritty details.
“Books are a fantastic way to understand the basic concept of a specific subject.”
Learn how to edit. Don’t rush yourself. Editing should be done when you’re focused.
Once you write something, step away from it for a few hours, get back to it and THEN edit.
Remember: most first drafts can be cut out by 50% without losing any information.
In writing as in life:
“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”
When it comes to editing, technical writing gets a bit more complicated. You have to check for the following:
- overall quality
- copyediting for style
- fact checking for accuracy
- SEO
- proofreading for technical precision
There’s no good writing, only good re-writing.
Language quality matters, and it’s much more than grammar and tone. If your customers start noticing inconsistencies, incompetence, and typos — you will lose their trust.
Read your content out loud.
Then try reading your content in reverse. This is to bypass the brain’s tendency to fill in what it expects to see.
Cut, edit, re-phrase, trim it down. Use simpler words, don’t try to be a smarty pants, and don’t add unnecessary words and sentences.
For example, make sure your paragraph supports a single idea. Don’t cram everything within one paragraph.
“People don’t want scraps of fat, give them a delicious lean steak or a bite-size rich dessert.”
Customers are interested in problems and solutions. Keep it short.
“User documentation for end users is a place where they can get acquainted with product functionality, get their questions answered, and generally find out more about the product.”
It shouldn’t be science fiction.
Complex, long, fancy sentences are commonly mistaken for fine writing because they are hard to read which makes the content sound intellectual. But in all honesty, technical writing is about writing lean and easy to read content.
Last but not least, make sure your content sounds human.
The tendency is for technical writers to (sometimes) make their content too serious and way too technical, especially when dealing with a technical blog post. The thing is, it’s much easier for potential customers to trust you if you write like a human being rather than a robot.
That’s all folks! I hope this was helpful.
If so, hit the clap button and follow me on Medium.
Freelance Copywriter and Tech Writer @Copygrafique
