FAQ on Technical Writing
Technical writing is really an exciting sphere where you can find new friends, build new skills, work on interesting projects, use new tools, and so on. However, this job can also be challenging. So, in this article, I’ll tell you what difficulties technical writers face every day.
Targeting
Before starting to write documentation, technical writers should answer the fundamental question — ‘Who am I writing for?’ They should consider:
- Age
- Gender
- Education
- Native language
- Occupation
- Citizenship
And it’s great if someone from your team knows the answers to all these questions. But sometimes, they don’t, so technical writers should learn the audience by themselves. And it’s not so easy. For starters, you should gather a focus group and ask them all of these and other related questions, answers to which will help you in writing your documentation. But general and theoretical questions alone are not enough. You should also test your product with this focus group, analyze their behavior, gather feedback and take all of this into account.
And like this alone wasn’t much of a challenge, there’s one more complication.
Tech Writers Should be Socially Active
Unfortunately, technical writing is not for introverts — you will not just sit in front of a monitor and write. You will have to communicate with members of other teams, for example, with SMEs, developers, designers, programmers, etc. And it will not be just small talks, you will need to interview them to learn more about the product, so it’ll be professional meetings that require efforts.
Dealing with Subject-Matter Experts
However, SMEs are those people with whom you’ll frequently communicate because they possess the necessary data for your projects. And SMEs are the ordinary people who can be in a bad mood, they can be busy and not have enough time to meet with you, they can dislike you for some subjective reasons. So you’ll have to go after them when your deadline is approaching. This situation can be very stressful, so be ready if you’re going to start your career as a technical writer.
Dealing With Managers
Once I asked technical writers what tools they use, and I was shocked — many of them use MS Word. I have nothing against MS Word; it’s a cool tool for some tasks, but not for writing documentation. So, if your manager/team leader think that MS Word is enough, you’ll work using this tool. And, unfortunately, you can’t change anything, unless you manage to change their mind.
Difficult Projects
Technical writers work in different spheres — IT, engineering, science and healthcare, aerospace industry, etc. So, technical writers work on difficult projects that demand great efforts — research and examine necessary data. In order to create high-quality documentation, you always need to search for information and materials, and, more often than not, they are difficult for understanding. That’s why documentation teams stay late to prepare documentation for an upcoming product release.
Conclusion
Technical writing is an interesting sphere, but you’ll face different challenges and difficulties. I didn’t mention all of them. To learn more, I recommend that you read these articles:
- Difficulties and Challenges of Technical Writers
- Difficulties and Challenges of Technical Writers [part 2]
How did I become a technical writer? What skills do you need? Read FAQ on Technical Writing.
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Improving work processes is what everyone is talking about. We ourselves have written a bunch of blog posts on this subject. Still, nothing is perfect, and many technical writers keep struggling with some difficulties and challenges regularly.
Technical writing can take various forms: user manuals, tutorials, how-to articles, context help... But the majority of tech writers actually share common job-related challenges.
We came up with a list of pitfalls tech writers have to face in their work:
- Dealing with subject-matter experts. More often than not subject-matter experts lack any background or experience in help authoring. So, the information they provide has to be re-worked in many ways. Subject-matter experts often just give you data without considering how knowledgeable [or not] users are. That’s why, for a help topic to make sense to readers, technical writers go above and beyond to restructure, simplify and provide explanations and references.
- Hello boredom, my old friend. We guess, when you are a tech writer on staff, you kind of get used to the product you are writing about, it grows on you with time. But many freelance technical writers or tech writing agencies take up documentation projects from different businesses. So, the Stockholm syndrome might not have enough time to develop in this case :] Such technical writers often have to dive into various fields, some of which might bore you to death. Alas, to be a good content creator, you have no other option but to dig deep. It doesn’t matter whether you like the subject, or it makes you fall asleep 10 minutes into the research.
- Working with what you’ve got. We are talking about software. It is no secret that the bigger a company is the more sluggish the process of approving and buying software gets. Oftentimes, you have to work with what you’ve got at least for the time being. For technical writers, the most essential tools are: a help authoring tool, a screenshot maker, a screen recorder, a grammar checker, and some others. Sometimes, they don’t meet the requirements and looking for functionality workarounds becomes part of your job...
- Meeting instead of writing. Seriously though, how do you skip all these meetings? They all seem so important...Here, developers will be talking about new functionality, and there we have testers pushing some changes that will most likely affect our documentation plan. Meetings inside the documentation team happen on a regular basis and you can’t just forget about the all-company meetings that are important as well. But, when do you actually write?
- The more projects the merrier. While we don’t believe that anything like technical writers confusing project terms or mixing up help topics will happen, juggling several projects is still not that easy. You need to become a time-management ninja to remember every deadline and fit all projects and their specifics into one realistic work plan.
Conclusion
Some of the enlisted things can get extremely annoying, especially, when there’s not much to do about it. Oh, well. That’s part of technical writing, and these challenges can also motivate you to work on yourself: boost your communicative skills to deal with subject-matter experts more efficiently, get on time-management courses, or learn how to become more persistent and confident to get that piece of software you want. And, these challenges will seem less scary with each passing day.
Good luck with your technical writing!
ClickHelp Team
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