Technical Writing Blog

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…

ClickHelp has grown a lot for the past few years in terms of clients and feature-wise. If you think about it, these two facts are connected. Listening to our clients and fine-tuning our development road map based on the feedback is how we prefer to move forward. Although ClickHelp is a pretty straightforward help authoring…

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…

Having the same role for a long time, doing similar routine tasks can make you feel stuck. When you have pretty much figured what you do, the question of what you should do to become better at it arises. Easy to Learn Hard to Master This title speaks volumes. It’s true for any craft, technical…

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…

To land a good job, you need to do well at a job interview. But, first, you need to make sure you even get invited. Today we are going to figure out how a technical writer can prove their worth in front of a potential employer. Specifically, we’ll talk about certification in technical writing. Certificates…

In this blog, we are mostly talking about classic user manuals and use those as a general example. Today we are going to look closer at two very popular use cases that are a bit different – FAQs and knowledge bases. Specifically, we will talk about how to make the most of them using ClickHelp….