Technical Writing
Do you want to improve customer service? Have you considered getting your manuals professionally written?
Allan Webb’s technical writing service uses nearly 50 years of experience in writing for service engineers, shop floor operators, IT professionals and military personnel.
Professionally written documents often deliver the following benefits:
- Increased sales
- Reduced service engineer call-outs
- Reduced learning time
- Reduced operator skill levels
- Improved spare parts identification.
What is Technical Writing?
A technical writer is a person who creates documentation for a technology. They are responsible for writing text that is accurate, readable, accessible, and helpful to its intended audience.
Technical writing, a subset of technical communication, is used in fields as diverse as chemistry, the aerospace industry, robotics, consumer electronic products such as VCRs or digital cameras, biotechnology, software, computer hardware, and many others.
Role of Technical Writing
Technical communications are created and distributed by most employees in service organizations today, especially by professional staff and management.
Writing well is difficult and time-consuming, and writing in a technical way and about technical subjects compounds the difficulties. The entire point of communications is to disseminate useful information. To be useful, information must be understood and acted upon.
Effective communications require quality content, language, format, and more. The entire point of communications is to disseminate information; this is where written content comes in. To present the appropriate content, it is imperative to understand one’s audience and writing purpose.
If a document does not communicate the information that the writer intends and what he or she wants the reader to understand, then the communication is meaningless.
The writer has a self-interest in making the extra effort: Looking credible is as important as being credible and getting results in business. Respect and credibility of the writer/speaker are integral to effective communications. Readers will not trust the information from an author if they do not believe that author is a valuable source of information or the purveyor of worthwhile ideas. Furthermore, being respected is essential to being persuasive, a key ingredient in business.
Technical writing is most often associated with online online help and user manuals; however, there are other forms of technical content created by technical writers, including:
- Alarm clearing procedures
- Annunciator response procedures
- Application programming interface programmer’s guide
- Assembly instructions
- Business Guides
- Contracts
- Certification and accreditation activities
- Corporate Annual Reports
- Corporate disclaimers
- Developer Guides
- Feature Design documentation
- Getting Started cards or guides
- Maintenance and repair procedures
- Industrial film or video scripts
- Installation guides
- Magazine articles
- Network administrators' guides
- Network configuration guides
- Network recovery guides
- Policies and procedures
- Presentations
- Proposal (business)
- Reference documents
- Release notes
- Reports
- Requirements documentation
- Scientific reports
- Site preparation guides
- Specifications
- Technical papers
- Training materials
- Troubleshooting guides
- Tutorials (multimedia)
- User guides
- White papers