Technical writing means more than just knowing the technical jargon of your niche and being able to translate it into plain English. It’s also about focusing on the product and writing clear guidelines that are easy to understand and apply by both technical and non-technical readers.
How do you do that? By mastering a few key principles.
- Don’t Overestimate Your Audience’s Technical Understanding
Developers tend to overestimate their consumers’ technical abilities and often create documentation that’s a bit complicated. Try to avoid falling into the same trap.
You may find the difference between two components obvious, but it may sound like a foreign language to your audience. Try to cover any knowledge gap and put all the information your readers need at their fingertips. What technical writers try to communicate is to help your audience understand how to use a product, not make them waste their time learning about things that they don’t care about.
It’s better to provide content that is obvious and simple, as opposed to lacking and cryptic.
- Use Examples
By now, you’ve probably come across concepts that are more complicated to describe than others. That’s where examples come in handy. They make your instructions clearer and more accessible.
Some ideas require one example; some may demand more, while others are self-explanatory. Nonetheless, know that with every example you add to your documentation, you make your writing easier to follow.
- Add Visuals
Like examples, visuals are another interactive way to deliver your instructions. Keep in mind that we process visuals far better than words, so adding diagrams, annotated screenshots, illustrations or workflows to your text will clarify and enhance your message.
Not all projects allow the use of visuals, but on the ones that do, strive to communicate through visuals whenever possible.
- Focus on Content Instead of the Publishing Platform
The success of your documentation depends on content quality rather than the publishing tools you use. While standard basic features such as a table of contents, navigation controls or search bar help create a smooth reader experience, even then it will be for nothing if your text is not comprehensive enough.
Therefore, unless you achieved the best content version you could’ve dreamed of, and still have time to spare, you should focus more on your instructions rather than finding innovative and time-consuming tools.
- Try out the Instructions Yourself
Like when an article is written by an expert versus an industry novice, it’s quite easy to discern if a technical writer has written the instructions using only information others provided or if he performed the tasks himself. Not to mention, this makes the difference between good and poor documentation.
However, it may be difficult to do sometimes. You may have to set up a specific server environment, or need advanced knowledge you can access only under certain conditions, or you can’t acquire at all. But try to test your content as further down the steps as you can.
- Work Closely with the QA Team
QA (quality assurance) people are a fountain of information as they know the system the best. When they tested its functionality, they had test environments set up along with at least two test cases, positive and negative. Their results and observations will make your writing easier.
On the other hand, their responsibilities are limited to testing if features work or not, but not the situations they’ll be used in. For more complex business information and a bigger picture, you should ask the product manager.
- Always Ask for User Feedback
While your first-hand experience with the product or software helps, it’s not enough. For a more accurate evaluation of your documentation, it’s necessary to get input from your readers.
Whether it’s through direct interaction, a forum or support center, their feedback will give you insights on needs, challenges, and concerns they have that you might have missed.
- Make Web Format Your Main Deliverable
In a time when business operations seem to move to the cloud and almost everything happens online, it’s more than safe to assume that your guide will be published on the web instead of as a printed material.
That changes the rules you usually apply to your content. You’ll have to write pages that provide all the information a reader with a certain goal in mind needs but also include keywords and apply other SEO optimization techniques. You may also need to embed tabs and filters users can click through for more information, and so on.
Technical writing requires different set of skills. More than crafting well-structured sentences in an engaging tone, you need to create content that makes even the most difficult piece of technical data easy to understand.
