Shanghai Tech Writer

Technical writing sounds boring. All technical writers do all day is write help manuals. Who reads manuals anyway? They are hard to understand and nobody reads them.

These are comments I hear quite often, misconstrued and misunderstood, about the technical writing profession. (Is technical writing even a profession?)

I confess I also thought that way about technical writing until I learned more about the profession and became a technical writer myself. I’ve been a technical writer for almost half a year now. The longer I’ve been a technical writer, the more I think technical writing is a great profession. Not only that, I think technical writers are important to a company’s success in marketing and selling their products!

Gryphon Mountain wrote a post titled “Seven Reasons Your Company Needs a Technical Communicator.” He gave seven reasons why companies need technical communicators, also known as technical writers. I listed the seven reasons here, but you can read the entire article on his blog.

1. End users need documentation
2. Technical communicators look at the product with a user perspective
3. Technical communicators help with quality assurance
4. Having quality documentation reflects positively on your organization
5. Documentation provides a record
6. Documentation saves on support costs
7. Technical writers have a versatile skill set

Being a technical writer at National Instruments, I can certainly confirm the above-mentioned reasons why technical writers are important, especially to a company that develops and sells technical products.

NI specializes in virtual instrumentation. Virtual instruments give customers the freedom to define solutions that meet their particular needs using industry-standard technology. Basically, NI develops measurement, automation, and embedded applications that are user-defined.

Whatever I just said probably didn’t make much sense to most of you. That’s my point. NI products are highly complex and difficult to explain. While our developers are great at developing great products that revolutionize the automation and measurement industry, they don’t necessary have the best language or communication skills to produce quality documentation. Our developers are too brilliant to think at the level of users like you and me. . .

. . . and that’s where technical writers come in. Technical writers learn from the developers and interpret their brilliance, also known as technical jargon, to something more comprehensible. Technical writers provide invaluable feedback to developers about their products’ usability. Technical writers also produce documentation with end-users in mind. Essentially, technical writers bridge the gap between developers and end-users.

(Note: Not all help manuals are created equal, so if you’ve read some bad manuals, chances are they were written by developers and not technical writers.)

While writing documentation and help manuals might be considered dry and boring, perhaps documents that will never be read, the process in which technical writers are involved in a product’s development cycle is what makes technical writing an exciting and an important job!

There’s so much more to technical writing than just writing manuals. You can read about my typical day as a technical writer to see all the things I do at work.

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