Lesson 1: What is Technical Writing?
The importance of organization
Technical writers tend to pay more attention to organization and the order material gets presented than most other writers. In many cases, other writers have some leeway in presentation. More often than not the material can be organized in several different ways and still retain its effectiveness. This is not often true for technical writing. Since much of the time you're either providing instructions - by their very nature a series of ordered steps - or providing background information that builds on prior material and tasks already completed organization is extremely important. If you fail to give users an essential step of any procedure they will not successfully complete that procedure. If you fail to discuss a basic topic before moving on to a related advanced topic they most likely will get confused.
It's your job to analyze everything the user needs to do to successfully use a product and determine the order they need to do those items. Then you need to determine what the user is likely to already know and make sure that you provide every other scrap of needed information. In addition you must analyze how someone who doesn't understand the product as well as you do would think about the product and provide logical entry points to the necessary material given those expectations. It doesn't help to provide every scrap of information your users need if they can't find that information within your document.
