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.
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.
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.
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.
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.