What is technical writing? Is it good to choose as our career?

Question

What is technical writing? Is it good to choose as our career?

Answer 1

How to Break into Technical Writing

From 2000, through most of 2005, companies downsized and did not hire many technical writers, or anyone else.



Companies cannot now find the experienced technical writer who they need. Some company has already hired almost all technical writers who have worked in Technical Publications departments, know the complete tech. pubs. cycle, understand Java, XML, C# and .NET. Companies with openings for such experienced technical writers get no candidates when they advertise. Very, very soon, they will have to start entry level people who can learn the technology and how to write a decent manual or online Help on the job, like they did in the 1970s and 1980s.



Characteristics You Must Have

First, you have to write—a lot. At least 10 pages a day. Those who succeed at tech writing probably always thought of themselves as good writers. Writing always came easy to them. They enjoy doing the hard thinking called planning and outlining first. They enjoy doing research, interviewing, reading, then making the right decisions about what to include in user instructions. Then they attack the writing. Never a problem for them.



Perfectionists

Tech writers can’t stand sending any document out with a mistake in it. They obsessively catch all mistakes and fix them. We call this proofreading, and you absolutely must proofread before your employer launches the directions you wrote for, say, 200,000 customers.



How do these good technical writers know what to proofread for?

They have mastered writing perfect English, with no mistakes. Companies like to hire a Technical Writer who went through the arduous process of earning a B.A. degree. Professors marked up the college papers such writers turned in, and they eventually learned how to use commas, apostrophes, articles, and capitalization correctly.



Good with a Computer

Technical writers must become super users of some very difficult applications, such as FrameMaker, RoboHELP, Visio, HTML, Quadralay Web Works Publisher, and Microsoft Word. You use the most advanced features of these programs as a Technical Writer: styles, templates, conditional text, and XML output.



Writers who succeed at this career have to constantly learn new, difficult software. They learn a new application without going insane. They catch on to using new software quite easily. They can figure it out or learn how to use it on their own, with a reference book.



Have an ‘Eye’ for Good Graphic Design.

The pages (or screens) tech writers produce have to look polished. Their pages have white space, neat, properly-aligned numbered steps, bullets, and text.



Our writers (the best technical writers) produce pages and screens that look like a freshly cleaned bathroom: shiny chrome faucets, clean, folded white towels, gleaming floor, a fresh, new bar of soap. Good tech writers use the principles of good graphic design to achieve this attractive effect. They often hire real graphic artists to help them select great-looking fonts, covers, and page layouts.



They don’t allow big, long paragraphs. Too much text not only looks ugly, people won’t read it.



They Have Manuals to Show

Getting a job as a technical writer works much like getting a job as a wedding photographer: you have to show your previous work. That’s why, in our online course on this Web site, we teach you how to write two, real manuals, and edit them for you.



Technical Writing Certifications at Colleges

Find out if any college technical writing program you’re about to take has you writing real manuals or online Help. You must have samples to get your first job.



Learn It on the Job

We have such a shortage of technical writers now, the time will soon come when—if you talk them into it—a company will let you try it, on the job. You’ll have to accept a low salary, and work in a Tech. Pubs. group with an Editor and other writers who can teach you what to do. But you can learn it on the job. Just follow a good style guide, like the Microsoft Manual of Style for Technical Publications. And take our course on this site: How to Do Tech Writing.



Posted date: Thursday, February 05, 2009



Company Name: Webster Techwriters Inc.



Job location: Houston 77082



Contract or staff: Contract



Pay: $43/hr.



On site of off site: On Site



Travel: No



Major: English, Journalism, Technical Writing



Degree: B.A., Master’s



Job Title: End-User Instructions for Tracking Inventory



Skills needed: Writing of standalone, end-user instructions for equipment, software user interfaces, procedures. Job experience in Tech. Pubs. departments at software companies where you learned modern procedure, numbered -step formatting. Word, FrameMaker, online Help (terse, concise, but accurate instructions).



Job description: Interview developers of a new equipment-tracking system used in hospitals by technicians, health-care providers. Install a hardware piece, learn and use 33 different GUI screens to set up the system for each MRI machine, for example. Company CEs and SEs install and configure the software, you teach operators to use it.



How to apply: Send your resume, Word or PDF end-user guide samples you wrote to [e-mail]. We do not accept resumes that do not give the city and state where you live.



Contact name: Dorothy Webster



Web site: www.Techwriters.com

Answer 2

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Answer 3

In this situation, you will be responsible for the entire documentation project, from the planning stage through to delivery. You must be able to evaluate the product and analyze customer requirements in order to determine the information required by the end user. You will design the templates for the books in the documentation suite and ensure that documents are tested before they are delivered. You will write all the books in the suite and you are therefore as at ease writing installation guides as you are at writing APIs and online help. You will also advise the design team on the usability of the product or application.

You will work with a team that includes engineers (usually mechanical and electrical) and software developers. You will most likely report to someone who has no experience in or knowledge of technical writing, although you might report to someone who has worked with a technical writer in the past. If the previous technical writer did a mediocre job—as is, unfortunately, often the case—you may find that you are disliked or regarded with suspicion until you prove your worth.



Working on a Writing Team

Writing teams can comprise as few as two writers or as many as two hundred writers. As an inexperienced writer, you will have more chance of getting hired to work in a large team than a small team. The larger the writing team, the more mature its policies and procedures for developing documentation and managing the documentation project.



You will report to someone who is an experienced writer. At first, you will be given easy projects to work on and you will be responsible for only one or two documents in the documentation suite. Your work will be closely monitored and you might be asked to rewrite parts of your documents more than once. You will learn to manage your time, use the desktop publishing software, interview subject-matter experts (SMEs), research glossary terms, and organize information. As you become more experienced, you will be given increasingly difficult documents to write (a product description, for example, is more difficult to write than an installation guide).



Most large writing teams will have templates that you will use as the basis of your documentation. Some templates can be quite complex, others quite simple. Regardless, pay attention to how the template is designed and put together. You might one day be required to design a template. Template design is a skill that few know how to do well.



Working as a Freelance Technical Writer

If you decide to work as a freelancer, you will be hired to complete a specific task within a finite period of time. You are paid according to an hourly rate or, inadvisably, a flat rate, which you negotiate with your client when you are hired. You will not receive any employee benefits and when the contract ends you will not receive unemployment insurance. You are not eligible for maternity leave benefits.



A contract can be renewed, but you might not be told that it is renewed until only a couple of days or weeks before your current contract is to end. Whether you begin looking for a contract with another company during the time of not knowing will depend on how certain you are that your current contract will be renewed.



The rates you charge depend more on what the market will bear than on your level of experience. You will keep track of the hours you work and you will submit an invoice to the company on a monthly or bi-weekly basis. Your check is not processed by the payroll department, but, rather, by the accounts receivable department. It can take up to six weeks to receive a check.



Since taxes are not withheld from the check, you must set aside a portion of the amount earned so that you can pay your taxes when the time comes. You should also set aside a portion of your check so that you can support yourself during downtimes between contracts. Until recently, a six-month reserve of funds was considered sufficient; nowadays, it is safer to set aside an eight- to twelve-month reserve.



Even though you are paid at a higher rate than a full-time technical writer, the company you work for saves money because you are not an employee. Companies do not have to pay taxes on consultants at the same rate that they do for employees. Since governments make more money from companies that hire employees than they do from companies that hire consultants, they tend to take a dim view of companies that hire large numbers of consultants. Furthermore, since you as a consultant can claim many more tax write-offs than an employee, governments might take a dim view of you too, unless you have your own employees. If the government, at least in the United States and Canada, believes that, for all intents and purposes, you are an employee and not a consultant, they can deny any claims you make on your income tax return and they can force your client to pay taxes as though you were an employee.



What do I mean by "for all intents a