Technical Writing Blog

Online documentation authoring is tough. And, it’s not getting any easier without the right tools at hand. Documentation is not a single article covering some topic, but a set of articles united in a single system with the use of structure, content presentation, common look, references, and other means. Do technical writers need some special…

Sometimes, you just open a user manual and know that it is bad. It doesn’t look sloppy, it has a lot of material, the hard work of the documentation team can be seen through the lines. And, it is still bad. How did this happen? This, my friends, is an example of a documentation team…

Picture this: You love movies, but you hate driving to the theater. You also hate the loud munchers and the chatterboxes who distract you from the plot. Oh, and there’s that one incredibly tall person who always sits in front of you. So, you decided to turn your living room into a home theater. You…

We wanted to start this blog article by explaining the importance of software documentation. But do we really need to do this? Technical documentation is the bridge between you, your customers, and the prosperity of your business. Of course, it is important. There are several ways companies can go to handle their user guides. Some…

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…