Introduction
Documentation is a vital but often unappreciated part of almost every software product. Most software documentation is written by technical writers, employees who specialize in the field. People not in the field often fail to appreciate just how complex the process of writing documentation really is and how dependent it is on developers and other software professionals. There's also a lot of confusion out there about just what technical writing encompasses.
What is technical writing? The obvious answer to this question is any writing about technical subject matter, but that isn't the correct answer. Another glib answer is the writing of computer manuals but that too isn't quite right (although computer documentation is a very large subset of technical writing). I've seen the term "technical writing" defined as "any writing designed to aid the reader in the completion of a specific task or process". That too is correct but is so general as to be practically meaningless.
Technical writing is really a cross of all of these things: writing meant to convey technical knowledge and how to apply it in specific situations to a very specific audience. In most cases that technical knowledge is operation of a specific piece of computer software or hardware and that audience is the person trying to use the same.
This course will highlight some of the key aspects of writing software documentation from the consideration of your audience to careful word choice to indexing and the reviewing and editing process. By the end of the course you should have a good idea of what writing software documentation entails and be able to approach software documentation projects logically.
Lessons
Click here to see course syllabus
