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What is Technical Writing?
Technical Writing is the act of writing for an audience seeking knowledge or information on a specific product, service, or skill. The technical writer’s job is to guide their readers using instructive details and this guide can come in the form of User manuals, technical reviews and reports, and support articles.
This type of writing is highly audience-based and purposeful in nature. Therefore, it requires the writer to exercise empathy by putting into context the primary audience, message, language, and length to optimize coherence and comprehensibility. It is also important for technical writings to conform with the principles of clarity, brevity, skimmability and structure.
Technical writing does not require the writer to have a technical skill on whatever it is they are writing about but having such skills can be a huge advantage and writing about them can also serve as an avenue to acquire such skills.
Importance of Technical Writing Technical writing uses instructive details to help readers better understand products and services, as well as how and why to use them. These details can in industrial settings save downtime or help eliminate them totally. And in a home-set can save end users resources for instance in getting a new product assembled. Technical writing breaks down the processes into easy-to-understand steps.
However, on the part of the writer, technical writing is an avenue for lifelong learning and can help the writer garner a wide range of skills which can set them up for new opportunities. On the other hand, opportunities for technical writers are rife and this can have a positive effect on the employment rate. At the time of writing this, there were a total of 5,026 Technical writing job openings on Indeed in the US alone and over 19,000 on LinkedIn.
Types of Technical Writing
Technical writing comes in various forms. These forms include but are not limited to:
Product User manuals
Assembly guidelines
Science and medical papers
Brochures
Proposals and pitches
Technical books
Professional reviews, and
Case studies.
These types of writing are user/project defined. The job of a technical writer is to make life easier for the end users by making complex processes easier for them to understand. For as long as technology exists, there will continue to be a need for technical writers.
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