What Does a Technical Writer Do?
This description usually satisfies most folks. A technical writer does far more than this. I work as a technical writer for a contractor at the NASA Johnson Space Center and have enjoyed this career for more than ten years. During that time I have enjoyed a huge variety of technical writing projects. Some of the reason for the variety of projects is that I often volunteer for projects and the other reason is that I have demonstrated my abilities as a writer to the degree that people entrust a wide variety of projects to my care. I began my technical writing career at NASA working for an aerospace engineering company. Here, as a technical writer, I crawled through mockups of pieces of the International Space Station with engineers and listened while they described how various pieces of hardware or software worked. Then I would draft a document detailing how this equipment worked and translate their engineering language into language understandable by anyone. As I learned over time, this
TECHNICAL WRITERS compose communication from product developers for users of the products. Users include consumers as well as scientists, engineers, plant executives, line workers, and production managers. Writers must write in a concise and easy-to-read manner for consumer publications or in highly specialized language for experts. With the increased use of desktop publishing, Technical Writers increasingly are responsible for the publication process including graphics, layout, and document design. Technical Writers create product instructions, reference and maintenance manuals, articles, project proposals, training materials, technical reports, catalogs, brochures, online documentation and help systems, Web pages, multimedia presentations, parts lists, assembly instructions, and sales promotion materials. Technical Writers perform the following tasks: • Analyze the needs of the target audience. • Study data and conduct in-depth interviews with subject matter experts to understand the
A technical writer prepares clear, concise written documentation which communicates technical information to a target audience. Some common examples of technical writing include user manuals for software, documentation guides for industrial machinery, and design or engineering specifications for construction projects. This is a very diverse field, and according to the American Bureau of Labor Statistics, it is rapidly growing. In addition to possessing the skill of creating clear written communications, a technical writer must also be knowledgeable about the field in which he or she works. For example, a technical writer who works on documentation for medical procedures typically has an education in the medical field in addition to language skills. Technical writers can be found in engineering, physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, technology, and an assortment of other industries. When a technical writer is assigned a project, he or she thoroughly researches the subject material. In
A tech writer explains and communicates complex information of a specialist nature. The material may be aimed either at technical professionals, or non-specialist members of the general public. Every field of life — medicine, science, law, computing, government, politics — has experts who need to communicate their ideas and messages to other people; but being an expert in a field doesn’t necessarily make someone a good communicator. Non-experts, or lay-people require information to be presented in a way that filters out unnecessary or confusing details or jargon and gives sufficient background information to make technical terms easy to comprehend. A technical writer does this job. Tech writers take the information from the experts and present it in a way that is appropriate to the readers who require it. They take complex concepts and transform them into comprehensible forms by using straightforward explanations and language.
