October 11, 2008

Lots of people in the IT world write reasonably well for an audience of their peers. However, writing technical stuff requires specialized sets of skills.

These specialized sets of skills are:

Communicate, Translate, Redesign user interface, High-quality documentation, Thinking from user’s perspective, Test the product, Holistic view of a product, work faster.

A technical writer:

1. Helps communicate without any kind of ambiguity.

2. Translates between the developer’s jargon and the simpler language the product’s users require.

3. [Like me] can also help redesign a product’s user interface to reduce the need for documentation.

4. Drafts High-quality documentation that helps reduce calls to the technical-support department of the company.

5. Begins by thinking from the user’s perspective, not the designer’s perspective. Thus, can explain better how end users can reach their goals.

6. Tests the product while documenting to learn how it really works. Whilst doing so, the technical writer may often discover bugs or usability issues.

7. Develop a more holistic view of a product than is possible for its developers, who must focus intensely on their own small parts of the product.

8. Creates documentation faster than the product’s developers.