The Not-Boring Tech Writer

The technical writer has a variety of valuable skills – such as making documents enjoyable to read and complex topics easy to understand – however, the skill that I think is most valuable for the technical writer is the desire to stay relevant and advance their career.  So we pick up a programming language; we get continued education; we dig into API documentation, hopefully through Tom Johnson’s...

We all know that successful technical writers are more than writers: they’re designers; they’re knowledge managers; they’re support. However, for technical writers in the dev world, they’re expected to gain new skills, particularly, understanding (and writing) programming languages.  That’s a challenging next step for technical writers – and understandably so: We can create docs, but introducing p...

2016 was a lovely year for The Not-Boring Tech Writer podcast. We had 10 episodes with 11 guests, covering a variety of topics that truly captured the theme of the podcast: how technical writers can break the stereotype that technical writing is a boring career. This episode includes my favorite segment from each of the 10 episodes. So if you hear a segment that interests you and haven’t dove into...

Paul Stoecklein knows documentation: As Documentation Manager at MadCap – the industry leader in documentation software – and longtime technical writer, Paul understands what does and does not work for documentation teams. A methodology that Paul believes is essential for documentation teams is single-source authoring: to use a single-source of documentation for multiple outputs. In this episode,...

We’ve all read (and perhaps written) a boring document: the robot-like language, the walls of text. And we’re all familiar with the result: a disengaged reader who’s likely missed the message. Enter John Espirian, freelance technical writer and Director at the Society for Editors and Proofreaders . John believes the difference between a boring and a not-boring document comes down to one essential...

Knowledge – as technical writers, it’s one of our greatest assets. However, amid the information overload technical writers often face, it’s also one of the most difficult assets to acquire. Enter Tom Johnson and Lisa Meloncon. Today’s guests and tech comm. advocates that have graciously shared how you can filter the information overload and shift your focus to the three types of knowledge you nee...

As the tech comm industry develops, technical writers must embrace a sobering truth: As Dr. Stan Dicks writes in Digital Literacy for Technical Communication , “Technical communicators who add value to their organizations do not merely write and edit documents.” So how do we prepare for the future of tech comm so we can ensure we’re adding value to our organizations? Preparing for the future is di...

Documentation and Support teams share a common goal: to give customers the information they need to get the greatest value from a product. But despite a shared goal, consistent communication rarely follows. The result: tech writers missing out on content-rich customer feedback, thus, as our guest Neal Kaplan phrases it, “creating documentation in a vacuum.” In this episode, you’ll learn how to bri...

We’ve all experienced the joy of community: colleagues mentor you; friends encourage you; strangers point you towards their favorite pizza shop downtown. For that moment, whether you had previous ties to each other or not, you feel that sense of community. And while every community is unique, one concept is constant: As urbanist Charles Montgomery defines it, “people gathering, talking, and helpin...

Where should user experience (UX) design fit in the technical writer’s toolbox? Well, think about how your users experience your documentation: Are they following a workflow path, following a series of pages to complete a series of tasks sequentially? Are they following nav links, jumping around to find task-specific information? Understanding how your users experience your documentation is unders...

Face it: sometimes, documenting software can be tricky. Not because we don’t understand the software – we get that. Nor because we can’t articulate it in layman’s terms – we’ve got that covered, too. But because feature guides – the traditional style of software documentation – isn’t enough to ensure your end users can find the information they need to accomplish a specific task. Enter just-in-tim...

What’s the ultimate stereotype of technical writers? Easy: that once you begin your career as a technical writer, you’re caught in a documentation vortex. And worse – that there’s no way out. But just like all stereotypes, they’re meant to be broken. As communication experts, our skills – analyzing an audience; writing crisp, clear, concise copy – surpass documentation into an industry many techni...

Once you’ve found your end-user, think about how you find his or her truest needs for the product or service. For many technical writers, it looks something like this: compile a series of  fairly generic questions – “how old are you?”, “how familiar are you with the technology?” – and hope their responses unveil their needs. Sometimes it works; but other times, you’re left asking yourself, “What d...