6 Skills required for Technical Writing

Technical writing is not just about writing. There are many hard rocks hiding behind the curtain you need to pass through.

Today we will go through all of the skills a technical writer must learn.

1. Writing

Writing is the base of the technical writing profession in which you must become an expert.

To expertise the writing apart from grammar and spellings, you need:

• Know what you are writing to get the basic information
• Who is your user to understand their perspective
• Know why you are writing, so you can write it in a certain format like note, warning, items list, or include it in the main content body.
• Draft your understanding until you make your point without considering the length of the document.
• Create your customized self-review checklist. This checklist must contain points of your weakness, a point in which you are still learning, grammar & spellings, and points of organization standards you are working for.
• Giving some time gap after the drafting process, start the self-review process. It will clear your mind and let you see all the corrections to make.

2. Research and analyzing

A writer can write documents only if you have the basic information on the subject.

Whenever you get the subject to analyze, start with if the subject needs documentation. Many times you end up putting effort into something not required, a total waste of time. These situations will teach you to find out the documentation impact.

3. Ability to use the required tools

A technical writer must be skilled to use the writer’s tools. The writer may require to use tools like:

• Document drafting (Example: Microsoft Word)
• Task management (Example: JIRA)
• Document version control (Example: Git)
• Content structuring and publishing (Example: Oxygen Author)
• Screenshot (Example: SnagIt)
• Screen recording, video making & editing (Example: Camtasia)
• Grammar checking (Example: Grammarly)
• Plagiarism checker — many online tools are available to choose
• PDF viewer & editor(Example: Adobe DC)

4. Communication skills

Communication skills involve skilled speaking and listening practices.

With communication skills, you can understand the documentation requirement, users’ perspective, taking inputs from SMEs, and build the communication bridge between you and the product team.

If you are successful in building the above cases, now you have everything you can ever require to document the impact.

5. Teamwork

A technical writer alone can not write the documents. A writer must collect the inputs from the product team for technical requirements and frequently connect with the technical writer’s team to understand and update the documentation standards.

It is teamwork, you alone can’t sail this ship.

6. Problem-solving

A technical writer’s role is not to complain about problems but to solve them.

Many times because of the priority, the product team may not able to provide all the inputs required for the documentation process. This time you are responsible to create an emergency and ask for required inputs.

If there are problems for delivering the content, ask for help from the writer’s team or let the client know for the delay and deliver the document at the earliest possibility- but with great quality.