What is technical writing, and who is a technical writer

What is Technical Writing?

Generally, technical writing is documenting technical and professional information in different fields such as scientific, technical, and occupational. A significant area of technical writing is sharing technical information with non-professionals through easy-to-understand language. Technical documents mainly help non-professionals or outsiders (Outside of a specific field or industry) to understand a subject or give them instructions and technical material regarding using a product.

Creating a user manual or instruction guide is a typical example of technical writing. Instruction manuals help companies teach users how to use their products and fix common issues. User manuals can target physical or software products and different groups of users. However, their target audience generally includes first-time users, so they have to explain everything in plain language, from getting started with a product to troubleshooting.

Since almost every business needs to equip itself with such manuals, let's figure out who should do technical writing and writes a user manual for a company.

Who is a technical writer?

Through the technical writing process, a technical writer will translate complex information into an easily understandable language, often to improve communication between manufacturers and end-users. 

Technical writers research and create documents through various mediums and provide users and employees with the valuable information they may need. The main steps of technical writing are choosing the information that needs to be shared with users, summarizing it in plain language, and organizing a neat and easy-to-follow document using different writing tools and skills.

You should consider that not just writing but investigating, testing, exploring the product, planning a document or writing a technical brief, collaborating with managers and technicians, and having frequent meetings with engineers and project managers take a significant amount of writers' time.

Essential Technical Writing Skills

Since technical writers will be writing the content that users should deal with, some skills are necessary for them. These skills will directly affect the quality of technical documents. The level of expertise in each skill depends on the importance of that role in a company.

The following skills are essential for a technical writing role:

Critical Thinking: 

• Analyzing available technical information and finding a logical connection between them in the writing process is necessary for this role. A good technical writer can understand the impact of their content on the future of a business and will consider long-term perspectives for the company.

Technical understanding:

• A technical writer should not only be familiar with different aspects and forms of technical writing but also have a good understanding of technical information and expressions depending on the company and product field.

Research skills:

• The research process can help a technical writer know a product or service and also the target users more efficiently. Therefore, a combination of research skills and technical understanding can lead to perfect technical guides. A writer with this skill can track data from the past and have predictions and plans for the future of a business and this is a golden key for every company to be successful.

Be a team worker:

• All forms of manuals and especially technical documents are a result of collaborative work between different departments of a company. A technical writer has a central role in this group and should communicate with different group members to collect accurate data and turn it into a user-friendly manual. therefore the ability to work with different teams and work as a team member is essential for this role.

Technical writing is not a one-person job.

Technical writing is not a one-person job. At least two (groups of) people are involved in technical writing. These people could be engineers, developers, designers, marketing and project managers, and writers. Accordingly, efficient collaboration is the key to better writing. 

Collaborative workflows with defined rules and steps ensure a higher quality of technical documentation. This way, you can ensure that your content has all your desired standards, and different experts from different fields can review it. Of course, such a collaborative workspace, where ideas could be shared and discussed, will lead to manuals that address the users' needs, solve their problems, reduce customer service pressure, and cause users to trust your brand.

While holding meetings for coordination, planning, and scheduling might be necessary, effective communication on the project speeds up the process and makes such meetings unnecessary. Using documentation tools that improve teamwork and cooperation will save you time while achieving higher qualities.

Collaborative writing at Sonat

Teamwork is important to us. Sonat provides a unique collaborative environment to improve your technical writing and is pretty easy for both individuals and organizations. Learn more about Sonat's collaboration options here.

if you are a technical writer and need an organized workspace or you just want to start your technical writing journey and need templates and tools to assist you or you need to write a user manual from scratch for your product or service, Sonat is here for you with great solutions. Sign up and use Sonat's lifetime free user manual templates.