By Kenneth Bernholm
Few kids grow up wanting to be technical writers, and it’s not a career considered by many grownups either. Technical writing doesn’t have an air of excitement about it like owning a startup or being a games designer. Even among writing jobs it pales. Creating movie scripts or authoring bestselling novels are the dreams of many. Documenting software libraries is not.
But technical writing has it own rewards like financial peace of mind. Technical writers often hold full time jobs with steady paychecks and job benefits that become increasingly attractive as you accumulate partners and kids and mortgages.
If this sounds too prosaic for you, and if you dream of fortune and glory, then technical writing probably isn’t for you. On the other hand, a lot of the things we do blossom with the right attitude, so let’s see if you have what it takes to be a technical writer.
Do you like writing? Are you good at writing? Do you like language? Do you enjoy proper grammar and well formed sentences? You can’t be a good writer of any kind without a certain love for language. For a lot of writers, it’s a calling. For some, it’s an interest. For you, writing must be something that comes as easy as reading. You can’t be a writer without being a reader.
Do you like science and technology? Loving your your smartphone doesn’t count. Do you have a technical degree or similar knowledge of a specific science or technology from work or personal interest? Technical writing is not only about being good with language. You have to understand what you’re writing about. You can’t wing it.
Do you care about details? Technical writing is about explaining things in the most accessible and understandable way to your readers. They don’t need high prose, and they don’t want to savour your extensive vocabulary. Your readers need exact information—not too little and not too much—to complete their tasks. You can’t publish approximately correct documentation.
Do you like people? Writing of any kind requires hours of researching and thinking and typing (and deleting), and we tend to envision writers as owl-like cave dvellers appearing only to present their latest tome before disappearing back into their world of words. This is not how technical writers work. As a technical writer, you must work closely with your team (you will come to know these as your Subject Matter Experts or SMEs) and your editors. You can’t do it alone.
One of the first things you’ll learn as a technical writer is to use an active voice. Don’t be discouraged by not knowing what an active voice is. As with so many things, it’s just a big name for a simple concept.
The simplest active voice sentence consist of a subject, a verb, and an object such as "The computer deletes the file." (Actually, you could leave out the object and still have an active voice sentence.) Compare this to the passive voice which turns the object into the subject: "The file was deleted by the computer". In the active voice form, the subject does something as opposed to the passive voice where something is done by the subject.
But the active voice is a technical detail. The broader considerations of technical writing are more important. Some of them are:
You’re not a technical writer without your SMEs and your editors. Pay attention to what they tell you, and keep a good relationship with them. You need your SMEs for input and fact checking, and you need your editors for pruning and optimizing. Also, never be afraid to kill your darlings. If you don’t what that means, go look it up.
If you still want to be a technical writer, there are plenty of courses you can take, and if you need a reason not to become a technical writer, take a gander at this funny bit by Suzanne Roquemore Ennis: