Planning to start a career as a Technical Writer. Read on to know the Technical Writing Skills set that you require……..
For performing any job you need to have skills. When you are a developer you need to have good coding skills. When you are a tester, you need to have an eye to look up to every minute detail. Similarly, as a Technical Writer too, you have to have some skills sets which would make you fit into the job easily. No matter whether you are already into a job or planning it as a career option, you would need these skill sets to move ahead in your career.
Writing Skills
This forms the dominant part of most of your time. It is the ultimate task that you got to perform – write about your product or services. Of course, you have to perform a hell lot of tasks before you directly jump into writing about something.
Know what you are writing about
Always remember when you are writing about something technically, you need to know about it thoroughly in-depth. Writing isn’t that easy. We cannot write about things that come to our mind or what our perception is about a particular product. In contrast, we are to write technically according to what the end user would demand and how they would want it to be presented. That doesn’t sound so easy, does it?
Audience comes first
For a technical writer, a document is successful only when it helps an end user. By end user, we could mean the audience. When a Technical Writer is writing, they have to keep their audience in mind and not how they think about particular product/services. So the good you are at writing, the better for you.
Avoid jargons and oral communication in your writing
A Technical Writer would spend most of their time writing about technical things, so it is very necessary to get rid of the verbal communication in your writing, if any. Often it happens that we tend to include our oral communication in our writing like the use of jargons. We need to ensure that we write professionally in the most consistent way. It is for this reason that we have Style Guides which ensures that we follow a certain pattern of writing.
Also read: Documentation Review: Tips for Proofreading
Be simple always
That other thing that should be taken care of, is the use of the most simplified form of writing. We need not make our writing too complex for the end user to understand. The writing should be in such a way that the user finds it easy to comprehend and understand.
For example, we may write the following sentence ‘ We follow the same paradigm all throughout the application’. However, it would be most appropriate if we make it more simplified and write ‘We follow the same model all throughout the application. Of course the first sentence is not too difficult to understand, but the second sentence will make sense even to a layman.
Here is where Technical Writing stands different. Generally people would struggle to find difficult (the ones that are not used frequently) synonyms for a word to flaunt about the vocabulary. But a Technical Writer has to struggle to find the simplest way to express their writing.
Communication Skills
Communication skills are needed to perform all your tasks prior to writing. Writing a technical document does not comprise just about writing. No one is going to provide you all the information that you want at one place. You would probably need to talk to developers, testers, QAs, SMEs and extract relevant information by asking relevant information.
You would need to look up at Technical Specifications, prototype of products or documents spread at different places to search for information that you want. And you are not blessed with enough time. In such circumstances, you always need to be sure that you make the best use of your communication skills.
In my previous post, I have already mentioned what communication means. So you would have to take care of all those factors. The person who would guide you with the information will never have all the time to help you. They are generally packed up with their own work loads. So you will have to make sure that you do not waste time on asking about irrelevant information. Additionally, if you trouble them a lot with you inefficient talk, may be the next time they wouldn’t want to communicate with you. So always make sure that you develop your communication skills.
Comprehension Skills
Now that you have collected enough information, it is also necessary that you comprehend and filter them so that you can deliver the most accurate information to your audience. When you are actually collecting information, you might get heaps of it. When you have the constrain of limited pages, you cannot put up all the information.
In such case, your comprehension skills will help you. It will help you to decide which ones to accept and which one to reject. The sharper you are at comprehending, the better are the chances that you will deliver more information with less struggle.
The above three are the most basic skills that a Technical Writer should necessarily have. Apart from these below are some skills which you should also have, however, it takes time and experience to develop them.
Technical Skills
Working for IT itself requires that you should have technical skills of some kind. You may not divulge yourself into a lot of technologies like the developers but it is always good to have brief details about them. It is also apparent the technology would keep on changing with time, and as and when you switch organization.
For Technical Writers, working in a java environment is the same as working in .Net environment (except when you are into API) since we are not involved too much into the coding and knowledge of computer languages. If you see it the other way, a Technical Writer has to adapt to technologies more frequent. Keep updating yourself from time to time. It is god to learn and gain knowledge. You may start with learning about the basics of Networking (that’s how I started) and then slowly shift your learning into coding, platforms used, etc.
Organization Skills
This skill set will come into play when you would have to deliver a document with time constrain. Sine you would have limited time, you would have to sit and think about organizing your different tasks.
Here planning helps you to set a time frame for each task that you perform. You would have to make sure that do not overspend too much of your time in collecting information or communicating which would leave you with very little time to write and review your content. As said earlier, such skills develop with time as you gain experience.
So, gear up and start exploring your journey!