The Technical Writing FAQ

What are the primary skills of a technical writer?

The first skill a technical writer should have, of course, is writing. You should be able to write in a clear, concise manner. Technical writing is not poetry or prose. Depending on where you work, you may or may not be able to add some stylistic flair. Either way, your job is to clearly tell your audience exactly what they need to know, and everything they need to know.

The second skill you should have is knowledge of a technical subject. My emphasis has always been in the field of computers, which is probably the largest segment of the technical writing market. Your knowledge can be in many other areas, however, such as science, medicine, engineering, mechanics, or law.

No matter what your area of knowledge, you will need computer skills, especially desktop publishing skills. At minimum, you should know the Microsoft Office suite of applications, especially Microsoft Word. Beyond Office, there is Adobe FrameMaker, which is used in many technical-writing environments. Other publishing packages such as PageMaker, Quark Express, and Interleaf can also be useful. In addition, online documentation tools such as RoboHelp, Doc-to-Help and Lotus Notes are great applications to have on your resume, as are HTML and other Internet skills.

In addition, you should try to develop interviewing skills, because you will probably find yourself interviewing technical people to get the information you need for your documents. Often, they will have no idea how to tell you what you need to know, so it is up to you to figure out how to draw the information out of them.

How do I become a technical writer?

This is my most frequently asked question, and a difficult one to answer. I can only tell you how I got into it. I have spent my entire adult life (and a good deal of my youth) as a writer of some form or another. When I entered college, I became first a reporter for and eventually the editor of my college newspaper. It was exciting, interesting, and very stressful. When I chose a major in college, I finally settled on creative writing, with a minor in English. I took very few technical courses in college and I have never taken a course in technical writing.

What I did do was work with computers, constantly. I got my first computer when I was 13 years old and I have never been without one since. In high school and at the beginning of college, I took some programming classes, but only about three of them. The rest of my computer skills I acquired either at home or on the job. When I transferred from my community college to the University of Arizona, I got a job in their computer department in the ‘Courseware Library for Instructional Computing’. There, I was exposed to just about every micro platform available at the time (IBM, Apple/Macintosh, Next, Commodore) and hundreds of software programs. I enjoyed it and I eventually began to teach seminars in Macintosh computing to the faculty and staff. While doing so, I wrote some short manuals and performed other various desktop publishing functions. After college, I had a series of jobs, all of them either computer, publishing, or writing related, until I eventually found myself out of work and needing a career path. I had done some technical writing as part of my past jobs, and I decided that I should dedicate my efforts towards building a career there.

Despite being broke, I managed to acquire my own copy of FrameMaker, and train myself on the package, adding that to my skills in PageMaker. I also taught myself HTML programming and learned to read C and other languages that I had not visited in many years. I sent out over 300 resumes and refused to settle for less than what I wanted. I used up all of my unemployment and dug myself deeply into debt.

Then, I received two job offers. The first one was to work as an Internet content developer for my local newspaper. It paid eight dollars an hour for 30 hours a week of work. I was willing to take it, and would have, but right as I was about to I got a call from a contract agency I had sent my resume to. Another local company was looking for a technical writer for a six-month contract. It paid $20.00 an hour, but much of that got sucked up when I opted for salary and benefits such as medical and dental insurance, holidays, sick days and vacation days. In the end, I started at $29,000 a year and after 6 months I renegotiated to $35,000. As my experience has grown, so has my pay.

What should I take in college?

As an undergraduate, I focused on creative writing and English. If I had gone to college with the goal of being a technical writer, I would still have majored in English or Creative Writing, but I would have minored in a technical subject such as computers or one of the sciences. For some, engineering may be a better choice than science. Even if you are a college graduate, you should consider supplementing your education. An associates degree in computers or another technical subject will prove you have learned the basics.

For graduate studies, more and more colleges are offering Technical Writing or Professional communications degrees. I recently went back to school to get a degree in professional communications.

I’m just out of college, and I want to be a technical writer, but I have no experience, how do I get my first job?

The first technical writing job is difficult to get, especially if you were a writing major and did not major (or even minor) in a technical subject. The first thing you need to do is prove you can write. This involves creating a sample of your work, which is not easy to do without having a specific project. What many people do is try to find a short, badly written manual (There are thousands) and re-write it. The other approach is to write a manual about something you know. The key is to have proof you can do the work.

Do I need a sample?

Yes. Prospective employers often ask for a sample of your technical writing. This can be a problem because these same employers are likely to tell you that what you write for them is confidential. For this reason, I use a ‘fictionalized’ sample. It is based on a short manual I wrote for one company, but I have gone out of my way to change any company-specific information. This was not fun, but it was the best compromise I could come up with. My sample is about 15 pages long. I keep it this short because the employers often want to keep it or review it, and they are not that cheap to reproduce, especially because I have my sample vellum bound with a transparent plastic cover. I also include an explanation of what publishing package I used and what the requirements and restrictions of the project were.

What is the best way to look for a job?

The Internet is a great way to look for work, and even better if you are willing to move around. I especially recommend indeed.com, which searches severl employment sites at once. I also try to hit all the local technical employment agencies. The easy way to do this is check the Sunday paper of the town you are interested in and look in the computer or technical employment sections. Look for agencies advertising several jobs and get either their fax numbers or e-mail addresses. They do not have to be advertising technical writing jobs. If they place technical jobs, then it is worth the time to get your resume and cover letter to them.

There has also been a growth in resume distribution services. These companies claim to send your resume to thousands of recruiters. I haven’t tried this approach, but if you are interested try: EmailMyResume.com, ResumeZapper.com, and ResumeXposure.com.

What should my resume look like?

Emphasize your technical skills. If you know a software package or computer platform or if you have a scientific background, make sure you supply details. I am a strong believer that good writing skills are far more important than knowledge of a specific subject or program, but the reality out there is that if you know the programs or subjects they’re looking for, then you have the distinct edge in getting the job. Writing skill is far down the list of what they take into account. I have gotten two jobs without even providing a sample of my writing. If you would like to have a professional work on your resume, try: Employment911.com or A and A Resume.

What kind of cover letter should I use?

If you are contacting an agent and not responding to a specific job request, then simply indicate a few basics about yourself. indicate you consider to be your strongest and most relevant skills. Don’t make it long and don’t go out of your way to provide details. If they want to know more, they will ask. Keep it short and simple.

On the other hand, if you are responding to a specific job description, especially if you are responding directly to the employer, then a careful cover letter should be written. Analyze the job description, and in your cover letter state specifically how you qualify for as much of that description as possible. Make them believe that you are exactly what they are looking for. Paraphrase their description as much as possible.

What should I ask for in negotiations?

Negotiations are a difficult process. Most agencies work on the “What pay range are you looking for?” system. This is a tricky system, but one that can be beaten. The key is to ask for more than you expect to get. Do this every time, and by at lease five dollars an hour. I give this advice for an important reason. If you are dealing with an agency and you under-price yourself, you are at their mercy. They will either give you what you ask for, or whatever the minimum in their range is. That is it. End of story.

However, if you ask for more than what their range is, they will then proceed to tell you what the range is. Remember, you aren’t dealing with the employer, you are dealing with the agent, and they know what the job will be bid at. When they tell you your rate is too high, ask what the range is and tell them that whatever the high number is will be good enough. It is possible to price yourself out of a job, but frankly, I’m willing to accept that risk. If you aren’t, then follow your own instincts.

If you are dealing directly with an employer, negotiations are more difficult. The key here is to wait until they are ready to extend an offer. If they ask early on what you want, tell them that you will be happy to listen to whatever their offer is, once they have one to make. If they get adamant about it, then you’ll have to name your figure and take your chances. Again, I recommend starting on the high side, but it depends on your instincts and whether you are willing to risk not getting the job in order to get what you want. I have been lucky enough to be pursued by more than one company at a time, and I have been willing to play the two off each other in order to get what I wanted. There is also a big advantage to already having a job when you look for your next job. You have the luxury of saying no.

The one most annoying question an employer can ask me is my past salary history. This has happened a few times, and I have refused to tell them on some occasions and I have told them on others. In both situations, I never got the job, so I can’t say which practice works best. I always take the question as a bad sign, however. Any company interested in this is not likely to treat their employees well, in my opinion.

What is a good technical writing rate?

There is, of course, no clear-cut answer to this. Rates vary according to geography, experience, benefits, and the current job market. As I write this, the market has been slow for a three years but is now starting to pick up. There are still more writers than jobs, but the numbers are evening out.

If money is a prime concern, then you need to be in a major market. I am currently working in Phoenix. Phoenix is a good market because there are several major technology firms (Motorola, Intel, AT&T, American Express, etc.) and there are quite a few smaller companies that employ technical writers. California in general and the San Francisco Bay area (also known as Silicon Valley) specifically are the largest markets, though they have also been the hardest hit by the slowdown in the technical industries. Dallas, Denver, New York, Atlanta, North Carolina and Washington State are also good markets. In those places, contract technical writers commonly make from $15-60 an hour. Salaried employment ranges from $30,000-90,000 a year. There have been more jobs in the lower part of this range during the slump, but compensation is also picking up.

Is it better to take a permanent job or a contract?

This depends on the job, of course. I originally chose to go the contract route because I knew that with a couple more years of experience under my belt, I would be able to command much more money than I would when I began, far more than I would be able to count on through raises. I also had no family to support, so I had a certain freedom to move around and to take risks. I did take a permanent position once, but permanence in this industry is an illusion. I have continued to take contract work and I prefer it.

If you do contract, you will find that you are generally treated differently from regular employees. This will vary widely from company to company, but you may or may not find yourself with a little less respect and acceptance, especially as a technical writer. You are disposable. Also, you will be expected to do your own training. Rarely will companies finance training for contractors.

On the up side, you generally attend fewer meetings and deal with less company politics. Also, I have always tried to get my training on the job. Moving from company to company has given me the opportunity to learn a variety of applications that I would be ignorant of if I had only been at a single company all this time.

To me the key difference between contracting and regular employment is one of attitude toward the company. When I am contracting I consider the company to be a client. I probably work harder to give them what they want, but I have less personal interest in the outcome. Even if I feel the project is flawed, I do what they ask because they are a client and that is my responsibility to them. As an employee, I get much more caught up in the reasons for projects. I am more likely to object to a course of action I don’t feel helps me or the company because I feel it is our mutual responsibility to succeed. I am more invested in the outcome and less concerned with pleasing the company. This may be different for other people, but I think it accurately reflects my past attitudes.

Why are there more contract/consultant jobs then there are permanent jobs?

The hard fact is that most companies do not value technical writing. They bring in writers to fill a specific need, often because they have been required to provide documentation for a project. Many companies bring writers in at the end of a project to document what has already been created rather than include writers in the full product cycle.

Why don’t more companies value technical writing?

Much more emphasis is put on the programming side of products than on usability and documentation because these are viewed as secondary issues. I strongly feel this has helped lead the technical industry into its current down cycle.

Technical writers are viewed as a luxury. As valuable as I feel my skills are, and can be to a company, the company can still function without me. If the programs or systems are undocumented, or if they are poorly documented by programmers or analysts, it will not damage the company as obviously as if the program fails to get developed. I happen to feel that a company that spends money on good technical writers will get a very high return for its investment, in more satisfied customers, smoother processes and greater institutional memory. I believe that dollar-wise this can make money for the company, but those are categories that are difficult to measure and often hard for management to comprehend.

Also, some companies do not understand what a technical writer does. Some consider writers to be glorified secretaries, and do such things as give them notes to type up or even have them take minutes at meetings. Part of the problem is that secretaries and administrative assistants have also become a thinning breed, and management (not the upper management, who have secretaries, but the lower management and team members) are desperate for anyone who can make a document look good. I once found myself at a company that constantly asked me to attend meetings simply to record the minutes. I comforted myself with the fact that I was paid $36 an hour to do it, but I also started looking for my next job,

What types of documents do technical writers create?

The range of writing a technical writer performs varies widely. Much is dependent on the technical specialty of the writer and of the needs of the company. You may find yourself a part of one large project, or overseeing dozens of smaller projects. You might write manuals, articles, proposals, white papers, product descriptions or any of a hundred other types of documents.

My specialty is writing manuals, especially user manuals and programmer manuals for specific software applications. This is the technical writing I enjoy most, because for me it involves solving problems and figuring out puzzles. To write a user manual, I need to think like the people using the program and try to tell them what they need to know, rather than what I would need to know or what the programmer would need to know. For me, this is a lot of fun and very fulfilling.

There are dozens of different types of writing that come under the banner of technical writing, however. Many people document processes. Processes can be just about any system by which something gets done. For example, in order for a company to generate a payroll, certain actions must be taken, such as logging hours and generating checks. All of those steps are part of a process, and intelligent companies document those processes so that, if an employee leaves or a system goes down, they have something to consult in order to get themselves on track. One name for this type of document is SOP (Standard Operating Procedure).

Another type of documentation is SLA (Service Level Agreement). The SLA describes exactly what a provider (company or department) will do for a customer (another company, another department, or an individual). These can be highly technical documents or busywork, depending on the service and the company.

Proposals, often written in response to an RFP (Request For Proposal) document are much like SLAs. They describe what work will be done, but they require more writing finesse because they are also pitching the service. The company is proposing to sell a service. I have written several proposals, and depending on the request and the company, they can be quite interesting or more busywork.

These are just a few examples of the types of work technical writers perform.

A Technical Writing Project Using Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Illustrator

Working with PDF Files

This week brought the first round of document editing. After spending last week looking for source files and confirming that at least thirty documents only have PDF files, I spent most of this week editing those PDF files.

PDF files are not intended for heavy editing. They are resistant even to light editing. In fact, one reason the company brought in a new contractor (me) was that none of the current staff were willing to attempt it. The rumor I have heard is that the contractor I replaced became “fed up” and he quit rather than take this assignment — good for him and better for me. I need the work and I do not mind the job.

Using Adobe Acrobat

As you probably know, you create PDF files using a program called Adobe Acrobat. There are some freeware translators out there that will turn a Word (or other) file into a PDF file, but Acrobat is the official program and it can turn just about any document into a PDF.

Using Acrobat, you can make minor edits to a PDF file, but Acrobat documents are very sensitive. Typing a single character can throw several lines off, destroy tables and cause all sort of other troubles. Alternately, it can be relatively uneventful and painless. You will not know until you type in that character.

Another problem with PDF files are embedded fonts. Because PDF files are meant to be read across platforms (Windows/Mac/Unix), many document publishers choose to embed particular fonts in order to ensure they get the desired look for their document. This means that the PDF file itself contains all the font information necessary to display and print that font, whether the viewer’s computer is equipped with that font or not. Normally, embedding fonts is a good idea, but it can make editing those documents (something you would normally never bother to do) complicated.

An important aspect of embedded fonts is that your computer will use the embedded font even if you have the identical font on your own computer. This means that, when editing, Acrobat may refuse to change or format a character because it uses an embedded font. You can work around these but the solutions are slow and tedious.

Using Adobe Illustrator to Edit PDF Files

One lesser-known solution to many of these problems is to use Adobe Illustrator to edit PDF files. Illustrator gives you much greater control over PDF pages and text formats. Illustrator has the ability to show individual blocks of text, which makes it clearer what you will change by typing something in. In Acrobat, you can only discover how much text is in a unit through trial and error. In addition, with Illustrator you can select a block of text and drag it to where you want it on the page (try doing that in Acrobat!).

The downside of Illustrator is that you can only load and edit one page of a PDF document at a time. Illustrator can also run into problems with embedded fonts. Its solution, however, is different from Acrobat’s response. Illustrator will replace an embedded font with a similar font. Unfortunately, the process tends to go smoothly only for letters and numbers. It goes less smoothly for punctuation marks, and very badly for special characters. Technical documents (and these documents in particular) have many special characters. I must frequently replace dozens of characters before I ever get to make the intended editorial changes to the documents. As I go through this process, I remind myself that the company pays me by the hour.

The changes, as I have indicated before, are minor. The company refined its manufacturing process and eliminated an outdated element across a wide platform of products. Due to the change, they have redefined package codes for those products. Because these are legacy documents, mostly dating 1994 to 1996, the products themselves are near the end of their lifecycle. Instead of inserting the new codes, I am changing the codes to a variable “x” so that (they hope) no future changes will need to be made. Some documents merely need a graphic (and the copyright info) updated and others require many small changes. I must, however, review each document must in detail to find these instances. The instances cannot be tracked solely through searches because many of the codes reside in graphics.

Technical Writing Jobs

This is not a job most technical writing books describe, but it is a common technical writing job. Not every job is about documenting new products or telling people how to accomplish things. Much of the work involves datasheets, specifications and reference guides. This is dull work even when you are creating the documents, and duller when you are merely updating them. This is also the sort of work that proves it is not always your writing skills that get you a job ? often it is your tools skills. Because I know how to use Acrobat, Illustrator and FrameMaker, I was a solid candidate for this job. Many of the jobs I have gotten came to me because I knew a certain set of development tools. Below is a core set of development tools every technical writer working today should know.

Adobe

• FrameMaker
• Acrobat
• Illustrator
• PhotoShop

Macromedia

• DreamWeaver
• Fireworks
• RoboHelp

Microsoft

• Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access)
• FrontPage
• Visio
• Project

Additional Resources

• Technical Writing 101: A Real-World Guide to Planning and Writing Technical Content
• What We Learn from Help Authoring Tool Surveys
• Adobe Technical Communication Suite 2