Technical Writing Blog

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…

Modern businesses love everything seamless. Like, Continuous Integration is a new go-to for software engineers. The underlying principle is sharing code as often as possible, ideally, several times a day. This means new releases become more frequent than ever and other teams need to keep up. For technical writers this means that help topics need…

Reality pushes us towards the biggest dilemma of technical writing once again – writing expertise vs. technical expertise. Many employers decide this based on their subjective thoughts on the matter which is not the best approach. Sometimes, this choice is heavily dependent on company traditions. For example, a company has been always hiring people with…

Do you like/read comic books? If the answer is ‘no’, you might learn a thing or two from this post. Not just about comic books but why so many people find them captivating and what technical writing can borrow from that concept. If you are into comic books, then you already understand their potential in…

A lot is being said about product life cycles. Marketers are paying special attention to them, many business decisions are done based on the stage the product is at. But if you think about it, technical documentation has a life cycle of its own. We can talk about the life cycle of a separate help…