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Technical Writing Blog

Grow your technical writing expertise with industry news, best practices, articles, product updates

Cross Team Communication for Technical Writers

Cross Team Communication for Technical Writers

If you’ve ever read documentation written by a programmer, it will become clear pretty fast that creating user guides requires a whole different set of skills. Sure, programmers might have the necessary knowledge base, but most of them aren’t very apt in communicating the information in a user-friendly manner. Thus, the user guides they create…

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Posted in TechComm Career Path on 11/2/2017

How To Optimize Documentation Team Workflow

How To Optimize Documentation Team Workflow

Your documentation team is one busy department. Useful documentation heavily relies on your team’s ability to keep the workflow moving, but in a business where things are notoriously fast-paced, that can be a difficult thing to achieve. With that said, you might find another article interesting, that is – Documentation Team: How to Delegate Tasks….

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Posted in Education on 10/30/2017

TechComm Zen: Balance of Text and Screenshots in User Manuals

TechComm Zen: Balance of Text and Screenshots in User Manuals

The numbers paint an accurate picture: visual content rules the digital world. Articles that feature relevant images get about 94% more views than content without graphics. Moreover, the human brain is wired to respond better to visual stimuli than text. In fact, we process images 60,000 times faster than the written word. That’s undoubtedly huge….

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Posted in Documentation UX on 10/26/2017

Technical Writer Job Scope: What Technical Writers Really Do

Technical Writer Job Scope: What Technical Writers Really Do

You may have seen this job title popping on professional platforms or in your network, only to ask yourself: what exactly does a technical writer do? The intuitive definition of technical writing is that it is a profession that focuses on documenting the knowledge base of products and services and making them easy to understand…

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Posted in TechComm Career Path on 10/24/2017

Will Printed User Manuals Become Extinct?

Will Printed User Manuals Become Extinct?

It is hard to imagine now that people will be ever going back to living thier lives without the Internet. Being offline will soon disappear as a concept. The IOT is about to burst, and this will finally settle ‘being online’ as equal to ‘being alive’. Our newspapers, TV shows, family pictures, work…Everything is just…

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Posted in Technical Writing on 10/19/2017

Documentation Team Onboarding: Helping New Team Member Adapt

Documentation Team Onboarding: Helping New Team Member Adapt

Becoming part of a documentation team can be a challenge for a writer who is not experienced in this type of work, as it requires a new set of skills and a very specific writing style and approach. Even if you recruit a writer with prior experience in creating documentation and user guides, you still…

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Posted in TechComm Career Path on 10/17/2017

Avoiding Common Mistakes in User Manuals

Avoiding Common Mistakes in User Manuals

Technical documentation is not just any text. It is a whole new world with its rules and patterns to follow. This article will explain how technical writers can avoid the most common mistakes when writing a user manual. Abbreviations Abbreviations are great. They save us time and effort. We can transmit information faster using abbreviations,…

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Posted in Education on 10/12/2017

Tech Writer Style Guide: Using Lists Correctly

Tech Writer Style Guide: Using Lists Correctly

What do we want from any user manual? Clarity and consistency. And, good looks. How can we achieve this? Well, as far as looks are concerned, you can start off by reading this article on user documentation design. And, there’s a long list of things that can be done to improve a user manual’s consistency…

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Posted in Education on 10/10/2017

Active or Passive Voice in User Manuals and Documentation

Active or Passive Voice in User Manuals and Documentation

If you are a native English speaker then the choice between Active Voice and Passive Voice is likely to be obvious to you. But, if you are writing user guides in English or working in an English speaking team while it is not your mother tongue – you should study the vital difference between these…

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Posted in Education on 10/6/2017

Possessive Case With Proper Nouns

Possessive Case With Proper Nouns

Any technical writer should know their grammar. Actually, they should know a lot of other things and possess many other skills. But grammar comes first. In case you are wondering about the ‘other things’ a tech writer should be able to do, take a look at this article on 11 skills of a good technical…

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Posted in Education on 10/3/2017