This is not technical writing
I recently attended a technical writing course at Armada in Birmingham and can’t recommend it enough if you’re looking to develop your writing skills. The course was excellent and the trainer was engaging and challenging.
Technical writing is an unusual discipline. Having to strip out opinion and ‘flowery’ or expressive wording to instruct people isn’t as easy as it sounds. There’s a definite skill involved in writing technical content; it can be tempting to slip in words and phrases that can make your writing look clever and interesting, but that’s not the result you want to achieve.
Sometimes user guides can be written in overly technical language, or read like a sales document, expressing the qualities of the product you’re trying to find out how to use. Whilst this might provide a more interesting read, the purpose of a user manual is to show you how to do something – not to sell you something or lose you in a world of technical jargon.
The technical writer isn’t there to tell you how to do your job either. Some manuals almost become training material, but a user just wants to find out how to do something, not why they should be doing it.
There are great authoring tools available for technical writing, like our favourite, Madcap Flare. Whilst technical authoring software can be complicated to use, once you understand how to use it, it’s invaluable when building a manual. We also recently purchased one Techsmith SnagIt license each. It’s by far our favourite screen capture program.
Please note, this blog was not written in a ‘technical writing style’!
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