Good writing has to some degree, been devalued in importance. You have only to peruse the internet to note the preponderance of badly written content -- even on the pages of prestigious businesses and media outlets.
You're in luck if you can afford a technical writer on staff. In lieu of that, you may have to take employees with good grammar and spelling, and turn them into tech writers. Often, a technical writer can be the same person who programs, develops websites, and performs other technical jobs. Generally, these individuals should be good problem solvers who are able to simplify and distill your company's technical processes into their essence, and then package the products into effective communications.
The ability to meet deadlines is also a plus. Above all, technical writers should be multi-taskers, capable of becoming certified in several areas. If you're eager to hone some of your employees' technical writing skills, training opportunities abound from your local community college, to seminars and workshops, some of which may be offered online. Even if you already have competent writers in your workplace, their skills can be refreshed and improved by this type of training.
Some of the things you will want them to learn are:. How to analyze the readership. Why Relocate to Salt Lake City?
Why Relocate to Redwood City? Why Relocate to New York City? Why Relocate to Boston? Clear Point Careers Sign up for the Clear Point newsletter for the latest jobs, market insights, and articles. It must be substantive, clear, correct, and easy to scan. Writing skills are an important part of communication. Good writing skills allow you to communicate your message with clarity and ease to a far larger audience than through face-to-face or telephone conversations.
It allows us to form connections, influence decisions, and motivate change. Without communication skills, the ability to progress in the working world and in life, itself, would be nearly impossible. Public speaking is one of the most important and most dreaded forms of communication.
Having sharply honed writing skills can help you clearly and quickly communicate updates, events, projects, or other important topics to co-workers without requiring additional time for clarification or questions. Begin typing your search term above and press enter to search. Press ESC to cancel. This is often what happens when a subject matter expert writes documentation but doesn't know or care how to explain things.
It's usually apparent when the documentation was created by someone who was forced to write it. I believe these titles more accurately reflect what many technical writers do these days. The goal is to educate and provide a self-service method of support and learning to your community.
In the SQL Server community, we often talk about the Accidental DBA —someone who might not have set out to be a DBA but is now in the role officially or not, full time or as a secondary responsibility at work. These Accidental DBAs have a lot of on-the-job learning to do and often don't know about best practices up front. In many ways, I have been an accidental technical writer throughout my career. No matter if my role was in support, development, testing, or research, I always ended up being the person to write about the programs, processes, troubleshooting, definitions, and more.
Helping people understand my work or sharing something I learned has been a lifelong passion. When SentryOne recognized the need to have a dedicated technical writer, I jumped at the opportunity to revamp the documentation and turn it into something more.
My lack of formal technical writing training might have led me to tackle this project differently than some in the industry. I have thought of and managed SentryOne Docs as a product and service from the start. I wanted documentation that combined different sources of technical content and was perhaps a bit friendlier and less formal than classic technical writing.
This eventually became the Product Education team, which included documentation and training. How do you know if your documentation is good? When people can do the following:. Once customers and employees realize the documentation is worth their time and is easy to use, they start to think of it as the first place to check for answers. It gains credibility, and this trust adds to the usage pattern. Your documentation should be treated like a living and breathing ecosystem of information that stays up to date as your product changes.
If you don't maintain it, its usefulness and reputation will decline. If you have related content e. Any materials that add examples and context to the content should be linked or embedded. Adding rating and comment widgets to your documentation will help you learn what's succeeding or falling short.
Technical writers are eager for meaningful and actionable feedback. If you think the documentation is bad, it's fine to say so, but specifying why it's bad i.
Positive reinforcement doesn't hurt, either. If you show the helpful articles some love, then patterns around documentation features that are most effective will emerge. It also reminds the content creators that people do read and appreciate the docs. Effective technical writing takes skills that often go unnoticed by those on the outside of the process.
It's important to have a team dedicated to documentation and product education to produce materials your customers and teammates will want to use.
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