-
Notifications
You must be signed in to change notification settings - Fork 1
Home
Technical Writing. Documentation Engineering. DX Engineering. DocOps. All these terms and then some are used to describe the various shapes and forms that being a documentation author can take. It can be a confusing, often obfuscated road - to make matters worse, "technical writing" can mean very different things to different people and different organizations.
Indeed, the term "technical writing" can encompass anything from documenting APIs to documenting how airplanes work. It can mean anything from producing hard copy manuals for medical equipment, to writing digital documentation for the most abstract concepts in tech. In short, "technical writing" can mean a lot of different things.
This guide, in concert with the awesome-technical-writing to which it is attached, is specifically oriented towards those trying to break into technical writing for software and digital infrastructure (ie. Cloud platforms). Throughout this wiki, several of the resources listed in the adjoining repository will be referenced (and linked).
Note
The contents of this wiki are written from the experiences of a few individuals, informed by our understanding of the industry as it exists today. Your mileage - the journey itself - may vary.
In general, when we ask the question, "what is technical writing?", the most common answer is to say that technical writers produce documentation on the product a given company builds. This documentation could be fully internal, fully external, or a hybrid of the two.
However, in practice, this is not the sole extent of what a technical writer does, nor does that description fully encapsulate the role.
Technical writers are more than writers, solely - we are responsible for information architecture, documentation workflow engineering, and, frequently, UX writing; elements that go into the product's design to educate its end users on how to use the product.
Beyond even that, technical writers often fall into taking on the partial roles of product manager, project manager, and internal education lead, particularly at smaller startups who do not have the people power to fill all of those roles yet still require them to exist.
To be a technical writer, in our view, is to be a writer, an educator, a project manager, and an engineer, all rolled into one. It is our personal belief that technical writing is one of the most versatile careers in the tech industry.