Beginning a Career as a Good Technical Writer


Everyone gets into a career for some type of reason. Maybe you wanted to be a fireman, or teacher, or the CEO of a major Fortune 500 corporation. Whatever you thought you wanted to be when you “grew up,” I’m willing to bet that not many of you thought you wanted to be a “technical writer.”

Becoming a technical writer isn’t an overnight process and doesn’t take an overnight decision. You don’t wake up one morning and say, “Today, I want to be a technical writer.” Although, I’m sure each and every one of you as read a set of instructions or a computer user guide and said to yourself or someone else, “I can do better than that!” I know I have. I still do.

However, you’re reading this article today, because somehow, somewhere, you’ve thought about becoming a technical writer. So, now that you’ve thought about that decision, let’s move on and think a little further. How to become a GOOD technical writer.

What it Takes

What you need to be come a good technical writer is

  1. a desire to provide quality information to those in need
  2. a desire to write
  3. good organizational and logical skills
  4. good communication skills – both written and verbal
  5. a desire to write

 

I know. I repeated “a desire to write.” If you don’t have a desire to write, then every task, every document, every project becomes a chore. And we all know that we don’t always give our best to things we feel are chores.

You must have a desire to write. Writing is going to keep you going when you’ve written a hundred pages of a user guide documenting the main process of a program and the project leader tells you they’ve dropped that process and are adding two more. That desire to write is going to keep you going when you write the same procedure four times, four different ways because each time it’s sent up the chain of command for review, the edits invariably change. Your document is no longer “yours” and by the time you’ve reached the final edit and are setting the draft in stone you realize it’s the same as it was when you first started the review process.

You have a desire to write. You’re a wizard at organization, and you have great communication skills. Now what? Are you a technical writer?

The copyright of the article Beginning a Career as a Good Technical Writer in Technical Writing is owned by John L. Hoh, Jr.. Permission to republish Beginning a Career as a Good Technical Writer in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

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