The Technical Writer: a Sketch

Technical communication is the bridge that arches from product engineers to customers. This bridge is built by people called technical writers. They are the ones who design, create and deliver product documentation in various media formats: paper, help systems, web sites, graphics, etc. Typically technical writers work as part of the development team and their work is often underestimated or invisible – until the final release date, when the product appears fully packed and ready to be shipped or downloaded by the customer. It is a myth that “customers don’t read documentation”. They do. But they turn to technical documentation out of need to learn something specific and when they have a problem to solve. And if they can’t find to do that, you can be sure the support center will receive a lot of calls from unhappy customers. On the other hand – the right documentation delivered in the right form and at the right place – can make the difference between a successful, working product and a failure to deliver on promises.

It is the mission of the technical writer to empathize with the customer, to know what works and what doesn’t work in technical communication, and to act upon that knowledge. In other words, strong writing skills are not enough to achieve high standards and high customer satisfaction through technical documentation. They are just a pre-requisite or one single component of a really complex and unique set of skills:

• Ability to understand software products and their underlying technologies. Tech writers should be able to gain knowledge about a product’s functionality from the software specifications and other engineering documentation. They should become intimate with the products they’re writing about – in fact they have to split their time between testing, writing and interviewing developers.
• Ability to build rapport with engineers. Since the engineers who design and develop the product are one of the most important sources of information, it is critical for the technical writer to build good working relationships with them, to speak their language, and to value their time and input. This is a soft skill, but most decisive with projects that have incomplete or outdated specifications.
• Ability to understand, empathize and write for the specific audience of the product. End users have their specific problems to solve using the software product, and it is a tech writer’s task to find out who will use the product, how will they use it, and what is the background/profile of those end users.
• Ability to enable the end users to perform the tasks they need to perform with the product. This ability comes from product research, audience analysis, testing the product, sifting technical information and delivering texts in the right form and up to standard.
• Deliver quality documentation. The final deliverable – be it a guide, a manual, a help system, a tech note or release notes – is the tech writer’s end product, the one that is most visible to all. Quality technical information is easy to use (it is accurate, complete and task-oriented), it is easy to understand (that is clear and concrete), and it is easy to find. When we speak about documentation standards, we have standards that are common to the industry and standards that are specific to a certain company. A professional technical writer should follow both with grace.
• Ability to work with a number of tools and follow processes. These can be very specific depending on the company documentation strategy. A technical writer can use a simple word processor or a structured authoring tool for developing content in XML.
• Thorough understanding of the software development process and ability to create schedules and estimates based on product requirements and milestones.