Technical Writing Blog

What’s one of the most important things in a user manual? Its structure! Usability largely depends on how well a technical document is structured. There are certain basic elements that bring logic to your docs. We are going to talk about the best practices of their usage, so, keep reading. TOC A table of contents…

Every member of the techcomm community loves technical writing for one reason or another. Otherwise, why would they stick to this industry, right? Help authoring is quite a special occupation that requires a certain personality type and skill set, we already spoke about in the article on the perfect skills for a technical writer. What…

Famous life coaches and positive thinking advocates advise focusing on the solution, not the problem. This idea works in technical writing, as well. Aside from descriptive help topics, the rest of the content is supposed to provide ready solutions to clients. Maybe somebody reads technical documents to get acquainted with a product, but mostly people…

Things like DevOps and Agile create more opportunities for cross-team collaboration. And, that’s what is required of any business now – smoother seamless product delivery. Technical writers are a huge part of this puzzle, and, finally, some real merge is happening due to technical documentation being available online. The same rules apply to online docs…

On this blog, we are trying to help novice technical writers find a perfect industry to launch their career by reviewing trends in techcomm. Like, for example, we have blogs on salaries of technical writers or industries that employ them. This information is also great for experienced techcomm people who like to know what’s going…

People love open source software. Firstly, the code is open, so it feels more secure to work with a product once you’ve seen its insides. Secondly, you can measure your own worth by trying to contribute. And, thirdly, open source provides fertile soil for online communities, and being a part of them can be a…

Adverbs are evil. You’ll see this repeated over and over in numerous articles that promise to teach you the fine art of writing. Technical writers create a lot of text, some of it is less generic than other and this ‘less generic text’ brings them closer to novelists, bloggers journalists, as they start wondering whether…

If you have seen the last season of ‘The Game of Thrones’ then you should remember why Tyrion thought it was a good idea to make Bran the King of the Seven Kingdoms. He said that Bran had the best story. And people love nothing more than a good story. While Jon Snow would argue…

There are several ways of how clients can interact with your company. The most obvious way is through your product directly. That’s truly something your company will be known and recognised through. But, there are other things, too, like: Your corporate website Technical support User manuals As a techcomm blog, we are mostly interested in…

People come to technical writing from various fields and backgrounds. Quite often these people can be connected with other forms of writing. Journalists, bloggers, and others who have mostly dealt with more creative forms of content can feel trapped in the help authoring routine. They feel smothered by the lack of creativity, or, to put…