Technical Writing Blog

Technical Support never sleeps. We are lucky to live in this customer oriented world. But for those who make it all happen – support workers – it can be tough at times. Especially, when people need to deal with the same questions from day to day. Yes, support can turn into a sad Groundhog Day…

We continue our review of free tools for technical writers and software documentation authors. Last time, we talked about image and video editing tools for software documentation writers. In this blog post, we are going to cover an important field with ever growing influence – community and social networking, as well as the way to…

Technical writing is a very broad term, it is much more that just ‘writing’ stuff. It often involves design, graphics creation, video authoring, community building, and more. And the good news is that most of these tasks can be solved with free tools and services. In this post series, you will learn more about such…

Receiving feedback is crucial for all companies. This is the best way of finding out what route you should take in your product development, which help topics are poorely written, or what questions remain open after reading a user manual. How do I Get User Feedback? Product documentation is a perfect platform for getting feedback…

Many of us come into technical writing from different and often unrelated writing fields. I, for one, have a degree in journalism, and for the past ten years I have been writing fiction and poetry, while also working with Web content and development. At first I thought that technical writing would be boring, though possibly…

Do you plan on bringing a product to the market soon? There’s a good chance that this product should be equipped with a manual. Automatically you will face various issues. This blog briefly discusses some of these common questions about manuals. Why a manual? For many products, it is mandatory to include a manual. But…

Creating documentation for online publishing can be tricky not only for novice technical writers, but also for those focused on printable outputs. There are important conceptual differences between HTML and PDF (or other printable formats). One of the most obvious challenges is

Many HAT vendors have free versions of their documentation tools or servises. And ClickHelp isn’t an exception you can try our tool absolutely free for 30 days: get ClickHelp Free Trial. Let’s see what other documentation tools are available for a free trial… ClickHelp Free Trial Server: Author-it 30-Day Free Trial: Doc-To-Help Free Trial: ePublisher…

Read what it is and how it is better than MS Word or Google Docs. When most people hear the word “hat”, they think about headwear. But for technical writers, this is an abbreviation of a help authoring tool (HAT). Help Authoring Tools are used by technical communicators and software authors to create, publish, and…

Sometimes technical communication specialists are asked: “What is your profession?” And the answer “technical writer” puts many people in a dead end. They dont know anything about technical writing, documentation authoring, and of course about online technical writing and documentation tools like ClickHelp product. We discussed this question with colleagues during a break. Many of…