How can I get started doing freelance technical documentation?
I’ve just completed work on a gigantic, committee based project here at my company that involves about two or three hundred pages of documentation. Based on that, I can say this to you: There are two different needs we had, one, the need for someone to be able to take all the committee writing and give it one voice, polish it, make it english, make it hang together and make it convey the point in simple terms; two, the need for someone to know MS Word inside and out and more so that templates, forms, checklists, formatting, images and icons, charts, etc. looked good, fit in the document, were easily editable and expandable, etc. Our experience was that it’s easy to find someone to do the first (I ended up doing a lot of it but we could have hired any number of people in the NYC area) but finding someone to do the second is more of a problem. If this is something that interests you, I would say that cominbining hard core Word skills with very good English and tech writing skills will gi
No, don’t give up! There is a wealth of those companies; many of them just don’t yet realize they need someone like you. And you are correct that the combination of technical savvy and writing ability is uncommon. I came at it from the other side – I was a technician and engineer who can write. Look into certificate programs at your state college. With your English degree, that ought to get you in the door. If you can land a job using InDesign or Frame, you’re in business. They’re not rocket science, after all. Nor is Word, for that matter. If you truly are good, word of mouth should keep you working; good tech writers are scarce.
First, replace “good money” with “adequate money.” According to the STC salary surveys I was (once) at or near the top of the field in terms of pay and I still wouldn’t consider it “good money”. Of course, YMMV, and I’m not a TW any more. Next, make goddamn sure you’ve got at least one copy of that manual you worked on. You’ll want to have it available for potential employers to look at, assuming you can clearly mark the parts you were responsible for (“I did this cover illo, but not that one, the index was auto-generated but I edited it…” etc. etc.) Also, you’re going to need a reasonable portfolio of samples. These MUST be “sterilized” so that they don’t contain ANY proprietary information of any kind. If you don’t have samples, write some. Pick an existing, actual, product and write something for it. Lastly, some hiring people get nutty over specific software, so you may want to check ads and learn something about the stuff that comes up most frequ
I agree with cosmicbandito — your best bet it to establish connections with local companies. Join STC and start attending your local chapter meetings. Get to know people working for the companies you want to work for. When these companies have job openings or need contract work, you’ll be in a position to find out about them.
There are a couple of awesome open-source projects I’ve been working with that are really starting to gain popular support — but boy, oh boy, do they need decent documentation. If you’re up for a challenging mission, you could learn one and then publish a book OR make a small-fee-registration documentation web site (or Google ads, or don’t try for revenue, just use it as a first project). First up, we have Zope and Plone. It’s difficult to tell what they are from a quick glance at their respective web sites, so I’ll tell you: Zope is a web content management framework built on top of an object database. Plone is a CMS built on top of that which makes it pretty quick to set up a working shared CMS-type web site, with workflow features built in. Both are open source, free, and have lots of fiddly bits. These both have wonderful communities, easy to get questions answered, but complex and difficult to really get a handle on the thing overall. There have been some Zope books and some Plon
