Technical writing tools

This Technical Writing course focuses on methods and processes that are tool-independent. In fact, the primary tools a technical writer needs are:

* Interpersonal skills. If you cannot get along with people, you have no chance of succeeding as a technical writer.
* Language skills. Your English (or other language) must be of a very high level. You must be constantly reading, learning, and improving your writing style.
* Curiosity. Technical writing is about learning, and then passing on what you have learned. You must have an unending desire to know new things.
* Organizational skills. Unstructured data is useless. You must be able to take a mass of facts and turn them into understandable information.

Everything else is secondary.

That said, there are a number of tools you'll use in your work. Primarily, you'll be creating, editing, and delivering text and graphics. It must be organized so your audience will understand it and put it to immediate use. And of course, you'll want to store this information so it can be re-used.

That's what tools can do for you. At its most basic, technical writing can be done with just a pencil and paper. But obviously that's not very practical. So there are a number of tools that over the years have been developed specifically for the job of technical communications.

Visuals in technical writing are important.

* According to "a study on learning using a 94-page manual versus using 25 flash cards....people learned more quickly with the flash cards that covered key ideas and hints, and [not by] step-by-step instruction."

* This anecdote from Kim Nathans illustrates most users' reaction to documentation:

"I got my first actual feedback from a new employee (Director of Development) and he was disappointed that I didn’t include a pictorial storyboard of the process flow. It turns out that he didn’t so much read any of my documentation as just glance at it. I started thinking about how many of the consumers of this documentation will be like him, and was depressed to realize that there will probably be a lot more like him than like me (a compulsive reader who will read every word in front of her face).

I asked a marketing intern in our office for his opinion, and he pulled out a very dog-eared and obviously well-used document that he had printed out. It was nearly all screen shots with certain UI items circled sloppily (like they’d used a mouse to do it freehand). He enthused for a couple of minutes about this being the most useful piece of documentation he’s ever had, because he can quickly refer to it and easily find the steps he needs to take to accomplish whatever task it conveyed."

Tom Johnson comments that:

"In communicating conceptual information, it’s extremely important to reinforce concepts with visuals. Not just screenshots, but diagrams. This is one reason I’m dipping into Visio more heavily. Diagrams, not just screenshots, help users understand concepts much better."

All the quotes is this section are taken from Rethinking the Importance of Screenshots by Tom Johnson. Used with permission.


source : http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Technical_writing_tools


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