Tips for Becoming a Technical Writer

Advice and practical steps to help guide you on your path toward becoming a technical writer.

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So You Wanna Be a Technical Writer?

We frequently get inquiries from people who want to be technical writers. If you like to write and you like learning new technologies, it can be a good career choice. But many folks assume that if they can put a good sentence together and they can program a computer, they are ready to be a tech writer. Not quite.

Required Technical Writing Skills

Here are some things you need to be able to do to be a good technical writer:

  • Write a comprehensible and clear paragraph.
  • Plan and write a conceptually integrated section.
  • Plan and write a chapter.
  • Plan and write a book.
  • Plan and write a document set.
  • Write document specifications.
  • Understand the role of documents in a complete product.
  • Understand the role of a particular document in the product business cycle.
  • Learn several authoring tools, including Frame, Word, Confluence or similar wiki, Markdown, and others.
  • Learn how to interview subject matter experts (SMEs).
  • Come up to speed on new technologies quickly so that you don’t annoy SMEs.
  • Find information on new technologies on the web so you don’t have to ask SMEs too many questions.
  • Remember and be able to parse lots of special terms and acronyms, like SMEs.
  • Manage time to a deadline.
  • Write status reports.
  • Negotiate reviews.
  • Manage client expectations.
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These skills are just the beginning. Becoming a highly skilled technical writer can take five to ten years, depending on your past experience with technology, writing, or both. We don’t say this to discourage you, but to let you know that the path isn’t the two or three months that some folks seem to think that it is.

Getting Started as a Technical Writer

If you’re ready to get started, then here are the steps that we suggest:

  • Start taking technical writing and technical communication courses at the extension department of a state university. UC Berkeley has a good series and so does UC Santa Cruz. These courses teach you about technical communication and offer a certificate if you complete a program of courses. A certification on your resume tells the client that you have the educational backing behind any industry experience on your resume.
  • Learn a programming language well enough to do simple things, like create relevant code examples. Popular programming languages include Java, Python, Ruby, and JavaScript.
  • Learn a little bit about web services, including RESTful applications, and the roles of JSON, SOAP, and OAuth. If you don’t have experience with these technologies, look them up on technology-focused learning sites. Stack Overflow and W3 Schools are good starting points. If you go for a job interview, the engineers might expect you to know what these are and why they’re important. You don’t need to have hands-on implementation experience, but you should have enough knowledge to have an informed conversation about them.
  • Start doing some technical writing. Open-source software is usually abysmally documented. For smallish JavaScript packages, the programmer is careful and intense about their software, but does the bare minimum (or less) for the documentation. Pick an open-source JavaScript or Java add-on package and create documentation that improves the user experience with the software. If you do have coding experience, document some of your processes for tricky projects on CodeProject. You can also answer technical questions on Quora. Though you are creating these documents pro bono, they still count as public-facing documentation, authored by you, that you can put on your resume. You can also use these documents as writing samples.
  • Get used to the editing process. Enlist the help of an experienced technical writer or editor to edit your documents. Every writer needs an editor. The New Yorker has the best non-fiction writers on the planet and they have editors. Don’t take edits as slights, but as lessons that make you better. Take the edits, put them in the document. See if you agree that they improve the document. If you can’t accept edits and learn from them, you shouldn’t be a tech writer.
  • For more specific suggestions, see How to Get Your First API Documentation Job.

Note that none of these steps require that you have a job as a technical writer. But if you have completed a set of technical writing courses, have writing samples, understand a programming language or two, know what a RESTful application architecture is, and you are easy to get along with and to edit, we think you are ready to start applying for writing jobs.

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