Skills in Technical Writing

Technical writing is gaining recognition with time. To become a technical writer you should have strong writing, editing, and instructional designing abilities. You should be able to grasp complex subject matter. You should be able to write clear, concise, and user friendly documents. There are personal and technical attributes required in becoming a good technical writer.

Personal attributes
As a technical writer you should be creative as well as focused. You should have good communication skills. You should be able to write simple and grammatically correct sentences. You should know how to organize your thoughts and write them down convincingly. You should have the ability to interact with management as well as end users.

Technical attributes
In general, people with degrees in journalism, mass communication, English literature, and engineering are favored. However, this varies from company to company. For example, a Telecom company will prefer a person with technical or engineering background whereas a company into legal documentation will prefer a person with a degree in law.

With the increased use of desktop publishing, technical writers increasingly are responsible for the publication process including graphics, layout, and document design. The following are some common tools used by technical writers:

• MS Word – Basic and Advanced
• Robohelp
• Dreamweaver
• Photoshop
• Acrobat
• Pagemaker
• Framemaker
• Flash
• HTML

If you are not familiar with these tools you can learn them with time. There are online tutorials available to learn these tools at your own pace. Above all, your ability to write well will matter. Companies hire inexperienced writers and train them in these tools and other aspects of documentation development life cycle.

Technical writing is territory of specialists who know how to keep the right balance of content, grammar, and style to reach the documentation goal. As technical writers you have to produce quality documents allowing people to adequately and correctly use technology. You might have to write for people with different experience level. Always keep your target audience in mind.