Can anyone tell me a thing or two about technical writing?

I have a feeling @Seek might be your go-to here.
I forwarded your question, or you could contact her directly.

Sadly, I know little to help here. I’ve never actually been paid to write.

@Jeruba or @Auggie would be my guesses.

I wrote a lot of documentation for a service I worked for a while back. Basically portions of the user manual, the testing manual, and a lot of support documents customers could use to help with the software and website. I think this is pretty typical stuff for for online services, but technical writing is a much bigger field and I think job-wise, it doesn’t hurt to have a specialty.

The main things i remember
– It got a lot easier once I started doing everything in three phases. 1) get the steps 2) rewrite for clarity 3) edit for consistency. Basically it’s really hard to go through any process while also trying to write something clear and concise. So just concentrate on the steps first, then make it better, then edit several articles/pages/faqs/whatever at a time to make sure you’re always using the same terms and labels for concepts. You don’t want to call something a “page” one place, an “article” in another, and a “post” in a third if those are all the same thing.
– Repeating yourself isn’t a bad thing, because people won’t read everything, just the section they need. Make everything stand alone, but standardized.
– Headings, labels, and hierarchy help people navigate and are just as important as the information. We ended up basically redoing everything at one point because it was too hard to find things quickly. We relied too much on single type of navigation (table of contents in our case)
– It’s very detail oriented work
– I thought capturing the technical content was going to be the time consuming part, but the organization and design that went into that ended up taking longer than expected, and editing even longer. Partially because we didn’t standardize our terms and basics before getting into it.

To me, most of it was very tedious, but I can see how the whole process of bringing ideas together in a very ordered manner could be very zen for some folks. I actually really enjoyed putting together the guidance and hierarchy rules for the overall documents though and that helped nudge me towards something along those lines.

It’s a great skill to have, and I think a really underrated portion of how a product/service/company interacts with their users/customers. If getting a thousand note cards in perfect and predictable order makes you feel good, it could be a great career.

@Haleth, I don’t know how things are in other areas, but I live in Silicon Valley. I wouldn’t advise someone to go into this field now, whereas ten years ago I would have said go for it.

In my decade as a technical editor at one of the big names in high-tech, I saw tech writing go from the product of close-knit on-site teams to barely competent offshore groups (not teams—no collective history or cohesion as a working entity) of new hires, people with no product knowledge, no technical writing background, and in many cases inadequate English skills. The move was supposed to save money on the writing side, but it put a huge burden on the editing side. I could not persuade my managers to look not at the writers’ comparative pay rates but at the cost per page of a finished document. They had no idea how many times we had to handle one document to make it mediocre at best (never mind the impact on job satisfaction).

What’s more, editors were becoming regarded as superfluous just at the time when they needed us most. Raw, virtually unreadable content was going into customers’ hands to guide their configuration and use of extremely sophisticated networking equipment with the potential to fail catastrophically. “Good enough” became the standard of the day. Ship dates trumped quality to a degree I would not have believed when I walked in.

They solved the problem of the editing “bottleneck” and overhead (“editors don’t actually create anything; writers do”) by getting rid of the editors. I was only too glad to accept an early retirement package. This was six years ago.

My colleagues and former colleagues at other nearby high-tech companies were having similar experiences.

I don’t think anything is going to turn this situation around. Instead, the outsourcing initiative is spreading work to other organizations in different countries abroad as the early groups price themselves out of the running.

If you were already in the field, I wouldn’t necessarily advise you to leave it, but from where I sit I don’t see a lot of promise in it for stateside Americans in the next ten years. Maybe someone who’s currently working in it will tell a different story.

@funkdaddy got the technical aspects right. @Jeruba got the business trend right :( .