I’ve been assigned some technical writing at work, with the expectation that I will take on all of the technical writing tasks. It’s a pretty exciting and lucrative plan for me.
The bad news is I have absolutely no technical writing background at all. I’ve been given an assignment to read up on technical writing. This will all be software focused.
What books would you recommend?
Phew! Your employers don’t make things easy, do they?
There was a time when technical writers got their start in much the way you are–their employer assigned them to do it,and they learned by doing. But times changed and so has the tech writing field.
Nowadays, technical writing degrees are available from various universities, and diplomas and other certifications are available from many other educational institutions. Courses cover everything: layout and design of both online help and printed materials, writing techniques, grammar, technical knowledge, the use of current and popular tools, and so on. Of course, there are also plenty of practical assignments that students can use to create a portfolio to show potential employers. What all this ultimately means is that it is a discipline that requires a lot of knowledge; and thus, very few people can get work in technical writing without having some piece of paper that says they are qualified.
Given all that, you can probably tell that there is much more to it than just reading a book on the subject. If I were you, I would look into a course leading to some kind of certification, rather than trying to read a book. Tech writing is a good career that is usually well-paid. Having a certificate will help with your current employer, but it will also make you more marketable if you ever decide to go elsewhere.
If you absolutely insist on doing your own reading, then at the very least, look into a local college or university that has a tech writing program, and see if you can access their reading list. Tech writing textbooks are much like any other textbook–they go in and out of favour every year, it seems. Any that I might recommend may no longer be in print.
Good luck!
Spoons
Former Technical Writing Instructor
Well, it’s an exciting assignment for me and I’m eager to do what it takes. I’ve got a good writing background and they’ve been so impressed with what I’ve produced for them so far they want to expand my duties in that direction.
It’s a small software company and if they outgrow what I can give them they can hire a trained technical writer (and I’ll still have plenty of other work to do). Right now this isn’t a career for me and I doubt my next job I look for will be in the area, but it could be- and at that point I’d look in to some certification. For now I just need somewhere to start and we’ll all see what I can do.
**Spoons ** is right. But don’t just jump at the certifications just yet - experience counts for a lot.
I’m a technical writer, and I have a B.S. in English from the University of Wisconsin with a minor in technical writing. I encourage you to focus on the technical part in the title - you need to know the technology you’re using, and know it well. If it’s a computer program, is it database-driven? Client/server? How do the clients connect to the server? Thin? Fat? How is data exchanged back and forth? How does it all work together? How are reports generated? Where does the information go after it’s entered? How does it get populated back and forth? (Yes, I work primarily in software development, how did you guess?)
You’re primarily a user advocate; that is, your job is to make users’ jobs easier by explaining how to do things or how something should work. By gathering as much information as possible, you’re better able to do that - your users might not need to know all that information, but you do in order to best be able to explain how the whole thing works.
As a tech writer, I use a lot of tools to get the job done, but the tools themselves aren’t really important. For example, I know HTML, but I don’t need FrontPage or Dreamweaver to put together a webpage (tho’ they are handy). And when I do need them, I can pick them up pretty quickly. Likewise, I currently work mostly in FrameMaker (a desktop publishing program; think Word on steroids), but I can also use Word to do what I need. Some technical writers focus on the tools too much and forget that content is king. Most tools these days are easy enough to learn (or you can get a book that will bring you up to speed pretty quickly), so focus on concepts and knowledge rather than what piece of software you’ll use.
There’s a lot of areas to cover - for example, usability’s a big one, but it’s useless to give you a title if you’re not going to be focusing on usability on the job. Likewise, there’s tons of project management and design books, but I’m not certain how much these’ll help you right now either. My advice is to hit the bookstore or Amazon and just browse. Grab a For Dummies book - yeah, they’re oversimplified, but it’ll give you a good starting point. Grab some books that appeal to you for whatever reason. Check out the Techwr-L website - there’s a lot of good information there, and you can sign up for the email list where people post questions and responses (tho’ they might be rather boring at this point as you might not be able to make sense of them yet).
Best advice I have? Work closely with your boss to determine what your first project is - is it documenting some software you have? writing a proposal? creating a grant application? applying for a patent? creating a basic website? making a help file? Figure that out, define the scope, then hit the web and search.
And yeah - addy’s in the profile. I’d be glad to help any time; just drop a line. Mebbe put SDMB in the subject so I don’t just delete it as spam.
Jump on in - I think you’ll do right.