What It Takes to Succeed as a Tech Writer

In this article, we specify what background, behaviors, character, and personality the upper echelon of qualified, hot, tech writers possess. Webster TechWriters Inc. finds and supplies this type of tech writer to our clients.

A great technical writer always thought of herself as a good writer. Writing always came easy to him. He or she enjoys doing the planning, outlining, thinking about it first, and the actual writing. After all, they often have to write for eight hours a day or more (after they have done the research, interviewing, reading, and making the right decisions about what to include in the instructions).

Good tech writers always proofread what they wrote and fix all mistakes, of all types. The Company publishing instructions for its customers wants to look professional, well-funded, mature, and respectable. If a Tech Writer sends out a manual (or Help file) full of writing mistakes, the Manager eventually must fire him or her.

How do these good technical writers know what to proofread for?

They have mastered writing perfect English, with no mistakes. Companies feel more comfortable hiring a Technical Writer who went through the arduous process of earning a B.A. degree, in Journalism, English, Philosophy, History, etc. Professors marked up the college papers such writers turned in, and that’s how they learned to use commas, apostrophes, articles, and capitalization correctly.

Occasionally, a Tech Writer learned from a parent, mentor, boss, or Editor in a job how to write perfect English—with no mistakes in grammar or syntax.

Writers who succeed at this career have to constantly learn new, difficult software. They learn a new application without going insane. They catch on to using new software quite easily. They can figure it out, or learn how to use it on their own, with a reference book.

Technical writers must become super users of some very difficult applications, such as FrameMaker, RoboHELP, Visio, HTML, Quadralay Web Works Publisher, and Microsoft Word. You use the most advanced features of these programs as a Technical Writer: styles, templates, conditional text, and XML output.

The pages (or screens) tech writers produce have to look polished, in addition to reading polished. Their pages have white space, neat, properly-aligned numbered steps, bullets, and text.

Our tech writers use the principles of good graphic design to achieve sharp, clean-looking pages. They often hire real graphic artists to help them select great-looking fonts, covers, and page layouts.

They don’t allow big, long paragraphs. Too much text not only looks ugly, people won’t read it.

The best technical writers have long-term job experience in known high-tech companies that make software, chips, networking routers or switches, computers, or medical equipment. We look for technical writers who have worked for several years in the Tech. Pubs. departments at companies like Oracle, Sun, Cisco, or smaller high-tech companies.

Successful tech writers communicate well in person, as well as on paper (or on screen).

The first technical writers, who worked for the Department of Defense in the 1970s, could succeed even if they spoke little, did not attend meetings, and could not express themselves very well.

Now, technical writers must attend meetings frequently, explain their documentation plans to others, get along with engineers—yet still get information out of them. And companies now want their Technical Publications department to have a good reputation throughout the Company. The writers have to look professional, exhibit good manners, and act as pleasant spokespeople for their department, believe it or not.