Posts about “Technical Writing”
So you work at a big hi-tech company and you have questions. Lots of questions. But your manager is in yet another meeting and your deadline is looming. Who do you turn to? Why, your friendly, neighbourhood technical writer of course. Here’s why:
Your technical writer may have written a 500 page manual on how your product works but you sure don’t have time to read that beast. Why not ask the author directly?
To be working on a project that is. At least it feels that way considering most writing projects I’ve been involved in are over after a hair-pulling night of throwing words onto a page or two. Project timelines are a bit more distended in the technical writing world. But, anyway, enough kerfuffle. What I’d like to present to you is the best business phone ever.
Yes, it’s the phone system I’ve been writing those 400-page Internal Product Specifications for.
I say eleven, because Ben Minson came up with this excellent list of seven plus four more on his blog, Gryphon Mountain. His list gives reasons why a company should hire a technical writer. Check it out if you need to justify your existence or if nobody has fought through the cobwebs to your cubicle in a while and you suspect the engineering department has forgotten about you. Or maybe you need to explain what-it-is-you-do-exactly in a job interview.
Wired magazine has some interesting pieces this month. Well, every month is pretty good, but writers might appreciate this behind-the-scenes look at how an article is assigned, written, edited, and designed. You can read the email correspondence between author and editor, and get an idea of how to pitch your story idea to a magazine. Great stuff.
Also, technical writers might get a kick out of this photo essay of classic instruction manuals.
In this rocky economic climate, marketing yourself has never been more crucial if you want to survive the inevitable cutbacks. When it comes to technical writing, it’s a useful exercise to understand and appreciate what companies look for in a writer.
Lyndsey Amott, in an article on her website, stresses that industry knowledge should not be a primary deciding factor when mulling over suitable candidates. Her top three must-haves are:
I thought it was high time for an update on the first two weeks of my contract. As I alluded to previously, the project I’m working on right now involves the design of a new phone. It’s a complex system with many components, and is rather hush-hush at the moment so I can’t really elaborate on it. Thus far, much of the system behaviour has been decided upon verbally, which is where I come in.
I’ve just signed a 6-month contract with Vtech to work as a technical writer in their engineering department! As you probably know, Vtech primarily designs and manufactures cordless phones as well as other wireless devices.
The company usually outsources their documentation to the States. Presently, however, they’re developing a completely new product line (sorry, I can’t say what it is) and need a writer in-house. This is a new position, so the challenge for me will be in ensuring that I get the information I need from the engineers without taking too much time away from their primary tasks.
DocTrain chugged along today and picked up some speed with a heavy emphasis on social media. As with yesterday’s post, I’ll give you the skinny and the slides on each presentation as well my pick for ‘what’s hot’.
Great people, good food, and leading-edge content. Kudos to the organizers and to the Marriott Pinnacle for hosting this terrific event. And a huge thanks also to the Westcoast STC for the opportunity to attend.
The conference proper kicked off today with some excellent speakers across the board. There were a lot of presentations, so I’m going to keep it short and give you the gist of each one along with my personal “what’s hot” recommendation on something juicy, cool or just plain geeky that I gleaned from the talk. If the slides for the talk are available online, I’ll embed them as well.
So without further ado, here’s my take on the presentations that I attended.
Today I attended a pre-conference workshop on Simplified Technical English (STE) at DocTrain West. Berry Braster, director of Tedopres, presented the benefits of writing documentation using standardized, unambiguous English, especially when materials are being translated into other languages.
The implementation of STE involves developing a company-specific dictionary and using documentation software to aid in the mechanical side of ensuring uniformity of language across the board. The goal is to ultimately reduce costs and facilitate quality assurance.
So, you’ve managed to land an interview. Congratulations! Time to prepare by going through possible interview questions and practicing in front of a mirror. Make sure you’ve done your research on the company and have some intelligent questions to ask them too.
Now what do you say once you’re sitting in the hot seat? Here are my top five tips for acing that tech-writing job interview:
Tell your potential employer that even though you don’t know everything about their widgets right now, you love learning new things.
Every profession needs a theme song, right? Here’s one I found about technical writing, unashamedly cannibalized from the Beatles song “Paperback Writer.”
This little ditty isn’t exactly inspiring with lyrics like these: “So I spend my day inside a lonely pod, but I need a job, so I gotta be a technical writer.” But hey, it’s worth a laugh anyway.
I mentioned in part one of this series that 80% of jobs can only be found in that elusive place called “the hidden job market.” About 20% of those gigs can be gotten through employment services, cold calling, and other tactics, such as information interviews. But the other 60% are landed through referrals. That makes networking your only way to access a big chunk of the job market.
So how do you rustle up some contacts in Vancouver, a city that has a reputation for being a tad on the chilly side?
I won a ticket to this year’s DocTrain West conference through the Westcoast STC! I’d like to thank the organizer Scott Abel and the good people at the STC for giving me this terrific opportunity. As I mentioned before, if you can afford the $899, or have a generous employer, then be there or don’t-be-square.
This conference kicked off in Vancouver today and is the place to be if you’re facing content management issues in your professional life as a technical writer, or if you want to stay on the leading edge of developments in the field. Each day has a specific theme. Day 1 (today) is about content, day 2 about technology, and day 3 about user relationships. I’ll be volunteering there the whole day tomorrow, and will tell you all about it later (if you’re going, be sure to say hello).
I’m going to start a series on finding a tech-writing job specifically in the high-tech hub of Vancouver, BC (which is where I happen to live). As I started the job search process myself, I noticed a dearth of information on this topic. I hope I can dig up some useful info for those in a similar position - eventually I’ll port this stuff over to my resources page.
So, without further ado, here is part 1, which will focus on job search engines.
Whether you’re a hardcore blogger or just thinking of starting one up, you can’t miss Northern Voice, Vancouver’s 4th blogging and social media conference. This event gets bigger and more popular every year, but is still “cheap, friendly and open to all.” It’s only $40 for one day ($60 for both).
On a similar note, the second DocTrain West is coming to Vancouver in May and the topic is - gosh, what a shocker - Web 2.
This is as geeky as it gets folks. The EAC meeting last night featured a talk entitled “Crouching comma, hidden hyphen” by Ramona Montagnes, one of the authors of the Canadian Writer’s Handbook and director of the UBC Writing Centre. This list was on one of her handouts.
The top 16 things likely to be overheard if you had Klingon technical writers working on your documentation team:
Klingons do not sit in meetings, we take what we want and kill anyone who opposes us!
A while ago Tom Johnson asked this question in one of his posts: “Is technical writing boring?”. He got such a plethora of responses on both sides of the issue that he and Heidi decided to explore the issue in a recent Tech Writer Voices podcast by the same name. It was so interesting I just had to talk about it here.
I’ve had people coming to this site and just ‘not gotten it’.
As promised in my last post, here is a little segment I’m going to call…(insert drum-roll here)…THE WRITER’S CHALLENGE! Will you muster your courage and face the cunning challenge I’ve set before you?
Here it is:
I am holding an object in my hand. Guess what the object is by reading it’s patent description.
Let me warn you, this is some of the most convoluted, ridiculously bloated writing I have ever seen being used to describe something that is deceptively simple.
There is nothing more sickening than a piece of writing bloated and weighed down by heavy jargon and confusing language. Call it what you will - jargoneze, legalize, bureaucrateze, or just plain gobbledygook. If you’re spreading this kind of rot, you’re a language killer and should be tried and condemned by your peers as such. In his essay, _Politics and the English Language_, the great George Orwell calls us to vigilance:
Here is a valuable resource that no technical writer, or technical-writing student, can do without: The EServer TC Library, a free library of articles on all manner of relevant subjects:
I’ll also put this up on my resources page. A lot of these articles are derived from STC conferences and are available in PDF format.
When editing technical documents, how aware should you be of regional differences in pronunciation? Here is an interesting article on the subject by Brian Forte. Forte raises the following issue regarding the usage of an indefinite article with initialisms:
How do you pronounce an initialism like HTML?
I was taught English in public Australian schools of the 1970s. So I was taught aitch rather than haitch. Which means I pronounce ‘HTML’ with an initial vowel sound and I write ‘an HTML page.