Seven Habits of Highly Effective Tech Writers
Know the Basics, Style, Project, Structure, Audience, Tools, Facts
Aug 11, 2009
Being a professional technical writer is, in part, a matter of practicing good work habits. And good habits are what differentiate the average tech writer from the highly regarded professional. Anyone thinking about joining the ranks of technical writers should also think about reviewing these seven habits, which provide guidelines for becoming effective professionals.
1. Know the Basics
Whether creating iPod manuals or Oracle administrative guides, writers should use language that is clear, concise, and complete. Sadly, many writers forget the basics of grammar and syntax and create content that is amateurish, or worse, unreadable.
Professional writers should eat, breathe, and sleep the grammatical basics. They should wake up thinking about words and sentences, singing the praises of voice and tone and structure. The mark of a professional is, above all, good writing. If writers cannot match tense, form sentences, use words properly, or write paragraphs, they should stop what they're doing and learn.
2. Know the Style
Most publications want authors to adhere to specific style guidelines that define how to handle such issues as acronyms, names, indentations, bulleted lists, titles, and other stylistic elements. The guidelines might also include information about document format, word count, or how to submit artwork. In some cases, editors tell writers to follow a publication such as The Chicago Manual of Style. In other cases, they provide in-house style guides. Often they do both.
Whatever their approach to guidelines, the writer should follow them. Editors don't have time to do the writer's work, and they don't want to tell writers how to do their jobs. It would be very unfortunate, not to mention unprofessional, for a writer to use the word poltergeist when the guidelines clearly say ghost.
3. Know the Project
Writers should know the scope of an assignment; the expected topic, slant, and word count; the agreed-upon deadlines; and how to submit manuscripts and incorporate edits - everything related to the project mechanics. They should know exactly what they've promised and then deliver it.
Writers should also keep their editors informed about delays, problems with the materials, or any other issues that could affect completing the project on time, in the correct format, and in its entirety. If a writer wants to be treated as professional, he or she must act as one.
4. Know the Structure
Professional writers know the importance of underpinning their content with a solid structure. For many, the place to start is with an outline. Although the outline probably won't take the form of the I-II-III-1-2-3 method everyone learned and pretty much hated in grade school, the principles should be the same.
A writer must provide a solid framework to ensure that he or she includes necessary information, eliminates unrelated information, and creates copy that is focused and organized. The last thing the writer wants to submit is a book about pregnancy that spends three chapters on morning sickness and one chapter on labor, delivery, and child rearing.
5. Know the Audience
Whether writing books about bird watching in Bulgaria or angling in Antarctica, writers should keep their audiences at the forefront. They shouldn't describe the molecular structure of snow to people who want to know about bird baths, unless they can explain it in a way the reader will understand and care about.
Writers should keep to terms and concepts that their readers will understand. At the same time, they shouldn't write down to their readers in a way that is condescending or simplistic. The tone, language, and subject matter should be consistent with the expectations of the audience. Editors will insist upon it. So will the readers.
6. Know the Tools
Writers live in the electronic age. Most editors these days rely on e-mail, word processing, and electronic files. A word processing program such as Microsoft Word will probably be the writer's primary tool. But word processing goes beyond merely creating and saving files. Many editors require writers to use the revision and review features within Word when incorporating the edits and rewrites.
Writers should also know how to make efficient use of e-mail and the Web. The Internet provides a vast resource for writers, but they must be savvy enough to leverage this resource effectively, or they can waste a lot of time.
Publishers might also provide templates, special files that contain styles and formats that must be followed when submitting a manuscript, or even have special publishing software that the writers must use.
7. Know the Facts
Technical writers must understand the concepts and products they're writing about and ensure that what they write is accurate. They must research, test, and verify every fact. This doesn't imply that they understand the technology before they start a project, but by the time they're finished, they had better be experts. The professional writer is one who knows the material completely, one who researches, verifies, checks, re-verifies, and then for the heck of it, checks again.
But then, that's part of being a professional writer. And as any professional writer knows, it's a matter of developing good working habits early on. And that's what these seven habits are all about.
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