What are the guides to technical writing?

Answer 1

Technical writing is simplifing complex task, suitation or tool in simple consise, easy to understand form. Technical writing is an art to delivering technical information to technical or non-technical users in a simple and easy to understandable form.

Technical Writing is done for a purpose.

Technical writing is creating documents that help someone install, uninstall,

configure or use a product or a tool or a service. It results in the creation of things such as user manuals, admin guides, instruction booklets and help systems, installation manual, but it just not restricted to this you can also write brochure, PowerPoint slides, etc.

A technical writer is a person who develops the technical documents. Various organizations assigns different titles to technical writers, such as document developer, instructional designer, or technical content writer. There is no specific education required for a person to be a technical writer. However, the minimum requirement to be a technical writer is graduation in any stream. You don't need to have any technical degree in your hand to be a technical writer. However, many organizations, especially software organizations seeks technical writers with degrees, such as BCA, MCA, BE, and B.Tech. The basic skills that a technical writer should have are:

• Writing Ability: It is not required for a technical writer be an expert in any technology but a technical writer must have flair of writing simple, customized, concise, and error less documents. A technical writer must be grammatically well sound. If you are not grammatically sound then you cannot be a successful technical writer. A technical writer must have ability to write on diverse topics.

• Analytical Nature: A technical writer must have the capability to analysis the given content and to create good technical documents on that analysis.

• Information Gathering: Information gathering skills of a technical writer makes him/her successful in his/her the field of technical writing. If you have flair of writing but don't have the capability to gather the relevant information for a technical document then you are a waste for an organization. Technical writing revolves around the information gathering. A technical writer can gather information from various sources, such as internet, books, and pre-written documents. Whatever be the source you use to gather the information, be ensure that the gathered information must be useful. A technical writer may need to interview Subject Matter Expert (SME) to gather information. It is not an easy task to collect the relevant information from a SME because a SME is a very busy person and might not give you the sufficient time to grab the information. Therefore, you must have the impressive communication skills to interview the SME and gather as much as the information you can from SME, in a short period of time.

• Quick Learning and Adaptive Capability: A technical writer must be a quick learner and have capability to grab the new concepts in a short period. With the growth of economy, various new products are being launched in the market. Before creating any document related to those products, a technical writer must have to learn them and grab their concepts. Therefore, quick learning becomes a vital requirement for a technical writer