Technical Writing Blog

The ability to work with SMEs efficiently makes a huge difference in technical writing. A lot of things like depth, clarity, and precision of descriptions in user manuals depend on how well you communicate your requests to an SME and how successful you are at interpreting and follow-up questions. Today, we will try to come…

Readability is something your readers should not concern themselves about. It is your job, as a technical writer, to make sure that ‘OMG this is so difficult to read’ never crosses their mind. This is not something, however, that can be approached mindlessly and solved just like that. To improve readability, first, you need a…

There are strong reasons for having a documentation plan. The main one being – setting up a clear and open help authoring process. Creating a documentation plan means giving every team member an exhaustive reference point. The whole team will act within the guidelines of the plan and that ensures consistency and efficiency. Structure of…

According to a poll we set up among the techcomm people, successful update of user manuals is among the most troublesome areas of help authoring. What you need to understand is that building reliable and clear processes for documentation maintenance is the key to success here. This article will explain how to set up the…

Technical writing is mostly associated with user manuals, software documentation, and the like. However, technical writing is an essential part of every industry now. That’s why, in this blog post, we want to describe some unexpected documentation examples that will bust misconceptions. Understanding Technical Writing: Definition and Growing Importance Technical writing is a specialized form…

From time to time, in this blog, we turn to analyzing the job market for tech writers, to provide you, our readers, with fresh and precise info on who’s hiring. And, well, the industries at the top of the list are pretty much the same: IT, engineering, spacecraft, gas and oil, medicine, and a couple…

If you think of it, dozens or even hundreds of criteria can be used to determine the quality of technical documentation. This blog is actually more than us listing some criteria, this is an exhaustive guide you can follow to find areas of improvement. We will look at this subject from two perspectives – from…

Don’t be cruel to your user manuals. Treat them well and your efforts will pay off. Happy customers will be the currency! Not Taking Mobile Readers Into Account The share of mobile traffic for 2019 was more than 50%. That says something. Technical documentation is perhaps not the resource with the highest mobile traffic numbers,…

We hear the term “topic-based authoring” quite a lot. ClickHelp is software for help writers that supports the topic-based approach. But how did it come to be? What makes topic-based authoring superior in modern techcomm? And, finally, how is it different from modular help writing? Let’s try figuring this out. Predecessor of Topic-Based Authoring For…

One of various things technical writers can do is compose questionnaires and write interview questions. Users are the perfect candidates for being interviewed! Goals of these interviews can vary, we will talk about that in a moment. For now, we would like to point out that users can be your best advocates and they have…