So you want to be a technical writer

If you’re interested in becoming a technical writer, or are new to the field and want to deepen your skills and awareness of the field, this blog post is for you.

What do technical writers actually do?

Technical writers can do a lot of different things! People in technical writing write how-to documentation, craft API reference documentation, create tutorials, even provide user-facing text strings to engineers.

Ultimately, technical writers:

The people reading what technical writers have produced could be using software they’ve purchased from your company, evaluating a product or service they are considering purchasing, undergoing a required process controlled by your organization, writing code that interfaces with your services, configuring or installing modifying hardware produced by your company, or even reviewing the documentation for compliance and certification purposes. Your goal, if you choose to accept it, is to help them get the information they need and get back to work as soon as possible.

Identify what you want from your career

Some general career-assessment tips:

Is technical writing a good fit for you?

My background and introduction to technical writing

I started in technical support. In college I worked in desktop support for the university, wandering around campus or in the IT shop, repairing printers, recovering data from dying hard drives, running virus scans, and updating software. After graduation I eventually found a temp job working phone support with University of Michigan, managing to turn that position into a full-time permanent role and taking on two different queues of calls and emails.

However, after a year I realized that was super exhausting to me. I couldn’t handle being “on” all day, and I found myself enjoying writing the knowledge base articles that would record solutions for common customer calls. I wrote fifty of them by the time I discovered a posting for an associate-level documentation specialist.

I managed to get that position, and transferred over to work with a fantastic mentor that taught me a ton about writing and communicating. After a few years in that position, writing everything from communication plans (and the accompanying communications), technical documentation, as well as a couple video scripts, I chose to move to California.

With that came another set of job hunting, and realizing that there are a lot of different job titles that technical writing can fall under: UI writer, UI copywriter, technical writer, documentation specialist, information developer… I set up job alerts, and ended up applying, interviewing, and accepting an offer for a technical writing position at Splunk. I’ve been at Splunk for several years now, and recently returned to the documentation team after spending nearly a year working in product management.

Where people commonly go to technical writing from

Technical writers can get their start anywhere! Some people become technical writers right out of college, but others transition to it after their career has already begun.

As a technical writer, your college degrees doesn’t need to be in technical writing, or even a technical-specific or writing-specific field. I studied international studies, and I’ve worked with colleagues that have studied astronomy, music, or statistics. Others have computer science or technical communication degrees, but it’s not a requirement.

For people transitioning from other careers, here are some common starting careers:

That’s obviously a short list, but again if you care about the user and communication in your current role, that background will help you immensely in a technical writing position.

Prepare for a technical writing interview

Prepare a portfolio of writing samples

Every hiring manager wants to see a collection of writing samples that demonstrate how you write. If you don’t work in technical writing yet, you might not have any. Instead, you can use:

Your portfolio of writing samples demonstrates to hiring managers that you have writing skills, but also that you consider how you organize content, how you write for a specific audience, and the level of detail that you include based on that audience. The samples that you use don’t have to be hosted on a personal website and branded accordingly. The important thing is to have something to show to hiring managers.

Depending on the interviewer, you might perform a writing exercise in-person or as part of the screening process. If you don’t have examples of writing like this, that’s a good reason to track down some open source projects in need of some documentation assistance!

Learn about the organization and documentation

Going in to the interview, make sure you are familiar with the organization and its documentation.

All of these steps help you better understand how the organization works, what the team you might be working on is producing, and demonstrates to the interviewer that you are motivated to understand what the role and the organization are about. Not to mention, this makes it clear that you have some of the necessary skills a technical writer needs when it comes to information-gathering.

Questions you might want to ask

Find out some basic team characteristics:

Learn about the documentation process and structure:

Find out how valuable documentation is to the organization:

Some resources for getting started with technical writing

Books to read

These books cover technical writing principles, as well as user design principles. None of these links are affiliate links, and the proceeds of the book I helped author go to charity.

This is an intentionally short list featuring books I’ve found especially useful. You can also consider reading Scenario-Focused Engineering: A toolbox for innovation and customer-centricity, Nicely Said: Writing for the Web with Style and Purpose, Content Everywhere: Strategy and Structure for Future-Ready Content, Design for How People Learn, and Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die.

Articles and blogs about technical writing

I like following resources in RSS feeds to get introduced to good thinking about technical writing, but not all good content is new content! Some great articles that have helped me a lot:

Blogs to follow (intermittently updated)

Great articles about technical writing

Other web resources

Twitter is a great resource for building a network of people that care about documentation. If you use it, I recommend searching for people who commonly tweet with #writethedocs.

Write the Docs is a conference and community founded by Eric Holscher and maintained by a brilliant set of volunteers!

The Write the Docs Slack workspace is fairly active, and includes channels for job postings, career advice, as well as current discussions about trends and challenges in the technical writing world.

Some talks from the conference I recommend checking out are visible on YouTube:

There are playlists for 2018 (which I did not attend) and earlier years as well on YouTube, so dig around there and find some more resources too if watching videos is useful to you!