Technical Writing Blog

Technical writing is a global notion. Technical documentation is written or localized all over the world in so many different spheres. Just imagine how many technical terms there are. Even if you have been a technical writer for a long time, working in one industry, it doesn’t mean that you know all the terminology of…

Creating user manuals is a difficult task on its own. Making them good is even more difficult. If while reading these first two sentences you thought to yourself, ‘Well, my technical documentation is quite good, actually’ – you might be missing an important point here: there is always room for improvement. Stagnation inevitably leads to…

What’s more important for a technical writer – language or technical skills? This question keeps coming up in techcomm discussions. It is partly rooted in the fact that technical writing as an industry is all over the place. There are user manuals on basically everything starting from kids’ toys and ending up with rocket science…

Technical writing becomes more and more popular as technology develops fast. More people are getting interested in this sphere, and some of them want to retrain to get this job. However, people don’t know where to start and what skills they need. That’s why, we asked Kesi Parker to share her story. She had been…

Being able to single-source technical documentation is arguably the main perk of modern technical writing tools. ClickHelp is among those help authoring tools that offer their clients various ways to single-source content. Single sourcing means that the same documentation project can be used to create different outputs and versions. So, you won’t need to have,…

Do people read technical documentation? This question has always been kind of looming over technical writing. And, this year, it became known to a much larger audience. Last Thursday, on September 13, 2018, the annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony took place in Harvard. And, not surprisingly (we will talk about why we believe it’s not…

Where do technical writers stand in terms of product adoption? Do they influence the end product in any way, or is describing product functionality their only task? To answer this quickly – documentation teams are equally important for product adoption and development as other teams. If contribution of technical writers is barely noticeable aside from…

What are neologisms, how to use them in technical writing, and why do they make some people angry? These are the questions we are going to answer in this blog post. What are Neologisms If we look through the corresponding Wikipedia article, we can find out that neologisms are, basically, words that have recently appeared…

User documentation is the face your company shows to the world. Having quality manuals is just as important as having a great support team. Remember, a lot of issues get deflected without actual involvement of support if documentation is okay. Plus, support teams work with users based on documentation for the most part anyway. It…

Some people have serious trust issues when it comes to storing data online. Especially, this is true for those who store documentation there. And, news about hackers stealing data appears quite often, sadly. Nobody wants their private data to leak. Even if the only harm this would bring is some mild embarrassment. But what if…