Technical Writing Blog

Do you have any second thoughts when spelling out things like two million three hundred thousand kilos? Or, on the contrary, when you prefer numerals in sentences like: Creating a new documentation portal will take you no longer than 1 minute! These sentences are grammatically correct, but something seems off with how numerals are expressed….

We recently posted an article on using parallelism in technical writing and this was kind of thought-provoking. Parallel structure is one of the most commonly used literary devices and while its role is a bit different in literature and help authoring, it proves to be useful in both fields. So, in this article, we are…

Developing good habits and getting rid of the bad ones is something that applies not only to our personal lives but our careers as well. Today we’d like to talk about good habits that technical writers can work on to improve performance and prevent burnouts. Behold! These habits will change things for the better. Creating…

Parallel structure, also called parallelism or parallel construction, is something you are likely to remember from school. Parallel structure in writing means that sentences or elements within sentences have a similar grammar pattern. Such repetition serves several purposes. In literature, it is often a means to draw a reader’s attention to a particular situation, certain…

Does authoring help topics make you an author? We believe it does. And although maybe everything you are creating along the lines of technical documentation becomes the property of the company you are working for, it is more about how you are perceiving yourself. The market is demanding, even on this blog, we are often…

You will certainly meet people in this world who say things like ‘I don’t care how this user manual looks as long as it is well-written and contains answers to my questions.’ It is great to know that some people are this practical and able to look past the visual side of things. However, people…

When a customer opens a user manual, the idea that the text is lying or it is trying to manipulate them will hardly ever cross their mind. Who would want to lie in technical documentation and why? The grim statement proclaiming that everybody lies proves to be true yet again. Here’s what technical writers lie…

While technical documentation is mostly associated with text, it is much more than this. Without visual content technical texts are boring and hard to comprehend. Using diagrams in help topics is a great way to improve your content. However, you need to remember that with diagrams less is often more; they are extremely helpful, but…

People like to think that they got rid of Waterfall for good, while in reality, many companies are still performing somewhere in between Waterfall and Agile. Nevertheless, even if you feel like you can’t call what your company is doing pure Agile, you need to be prepared to face what this new model is going…

In continuous integration, software developers submit code to a shared repository several times a day. The main idea behind it is catching issues at the earliest stages and fixing them. And, in theory, you can have new releases daily. This approach was introduced in the 90s. In late 90s, CI was described in several books…