Shanghai Tech Writer

As a technical writer, our job is to work with developers and content experts to document their products. Traditionally, developers and engineers document their own products. They write all the tutorials and related documentation that ship with their products. Nowadays, many companies hire people with strong language, communication, and/or writing skills to do all the technical writing work, thus the birth of the technical writing profession. Most often, technical writers are English or communications major. Some schools in the U.S. even have technical communications as a major—not as common but is becoming increasingly popular as the demand for technical writers rises. Occasionally, you find a few technical writers—former engineers and programmers—who would rather write in plain English then in codes.

In any case, technical writers have strong language skills but they may not necessarily have the technical knowledge, background, or understanding of the area or field they are writing about. Thus, it is essential that technical writers have the interest and the capacity to learn new things fairly quickly. Secondly, technical writers must be able to understand just the right amount of information so that they can logically and effectively communicate that information in the documentation they write.

These two essential requirements are the keys to being a good technical writer. They are also the biggest and greatest challenges we/I face everyday.

1. Knowing what we need to know—since technical understanding is not the job requirement, the challenge is to know how much to grasp in order to do our job.
2. Asking the right questions—learning something completely new and complex in a short amount of time requires asking the right questions. Again, our job is not to be content experts or to out-geek the engineers.
3. Seeing from a user’s perspective—our users are typically people with content knowledge somewhere between the engineers/developers and us. It’s a good thing that we don’t know too much because then we see the need to explain things that content experts might not think necessary. At the same time, it’s not always easy to guess or know what our users want to (or care to) know.
4. Working closely with content experts—since technical writing is a relatively new field, not all content experts know how to work with technical writers. In a typical product development phase and cycle, it is quite common for changes to be made on a daily basis. Every new change affects documentation in some way, thus it is essential that technical writers work closely with the content experts to ensure that all the changes are reflected in the documentation.
5. Technical jargon—the official language of our content experts! If we don’t understand it, our users most likely won’t either. Our job is to learn, read about, research, and drill all that jargon into our heads until we understand it. Sometimes it might takes days, weeks, or even months before something finally “clicks” for us. Then we have to translate that into plain English.

As for me, it’s been three months on the job so far and my brain is fried every day from information overload. Just how much do I need to know, what are the right questions to ask, and when will all this make sense to me. These are the questions that I still haven’t quite figured out yet.

The learning continues . . .

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