Technical writing: where are my skills at?
They are definitely somewhere.
Tuesday 1 October 2024
Technical writing… I almost want to say ‘how hard can it be?’, but I immediately suspect I’d follow that up with a ‘famous last words’ at some point in the next few months.
My original intentions were to write notes from Board Infinity’s Technical Writing course as an in-depth review. This ended up being fruitless due to the course being geared towards beginners - which I am not. Instead, I’ll contextualise some thoughts I had throughout the course.
I have what I hope is valid confidence in my capacity to write. My grasp of English is rock-solid due to a fortunate set of circumstances. I’m able to write with a prominent authentic voice. Those things are not enough to be a great writer. There are many kinds of writing, and each is accompanied with skills that must be honed to a sharp edge.
I have written research proposals, project documentation, technical specifications, and plenty of community guides. Most of these are over five years old (some are university assignments - shudder) and likely not up to standards I currently harbour. This leaves me starting this section of my writing portfolio from scratch; a daunting yet achievable task.
In beginning this technical documentation journey - which I will no doubt find bereft of linguistic flourishes that bring me joy - my goal is to highlight improvement zones, rank them, and derive a plan of action.
General impressions
The key takeaway from the course: technical writing is about utility. Clarity, conciseness, and logical ordering reign supreme. A fair bit of the course describes the different types of technical documents, how they’re structured, and the process used to go about writing them.
I was surprised to learn about the intersection of writing, design, and entrepreneurship. They all take the audience into account at a deep level. The course mentions typical surveys, questionnaires, and user interviews to solicit user feedback. From my experience, they can be found in more places:
- Use a search engine to look for issues; sometimes people complain about it online in various blogs and forums
- Look at where people are struggling in online tech communities
- Look at how people use the content; I once had an author watch me go through his framework book on Twitch and try to build; this was helpful for additions
I groaned when I encountered reading material structured like a common Wattpad novels - one sentence in each paragraph.
Just one sentence at a time.
It gets rather annoying when reading it on a wider screen, does it not?
The cadence may be harder to notice on a smaller screen but it’s quite obvious now.
Okay, I’ll stop being annoying.
My unique set of experiences removes me from the target audience. The course is fantastic for absolute beginners. and I would recommend it to anyone who doesn’t understand much about writing and the context surrounding the role of a writer. It briefly touches on most important aspects of being a technical writer, which are numerous and extend well beyond the writing itself.
The results
My experiences in design, entrepreneurship, academia, and coding already have me practicing these skills:
- Aligning content to a brand
- Write with planning, research, outline, drafting, revision and proofreading stages
- Building a style guide
- Competitor analysis
- Understanding audiences; demographics, psychographics, and segments
- Word-processing and referencing tools (MS Word, LaTeX, Obsidian, EndNote, Zotero)
- Graphic and design tools (Photoshop, Illustrator, Affinity suite)
- WYSIWYG, rich text, and markdown formats
- Version control like Git (GitHub, GitLab, BitBucket)
- Content management systems (WordPress, Drupal, Strapi, Decap)
- Management systems like Confluence and JIRA
- Search for keywords
- SEO topics
Things I can improve or learn to do:
- Improve overall SEO practices
- Draw more diagrams
- Localisation
- Distinguishing which types of charts or graphs would be appropriate
- Headline generation (I currently don’t do anything formulaic)
- Run a content audit
- Identify content gaps
- Competitive analysis (not to be confused with competitor analysis); understanding when to go broad versus specialist with topic coverage
- Bearing in mind industry-specific code of ethics
In the end (it did even matter)
A lot of that isn’t actually about the writing itself, which was more of what I was looking for. The course was still useful for figuring out gaps in my knowledge. Copy-targeted content should crop up in Google’s Technical Writing course, which I endeavour to complete as soon as the sessions are available.
The most valuable thing at this point for me would probably be feedback on things I write. I may just hire someone to have a look - unless you know someone?
Thanks for reading!