Have you always wondered what technical writing is, how you can be one, what steps to take, or how to start? This blog post, inspired by the Twitter space we held with the same title, will cover all those questions.
Technical writing is the act of writing or a writing discipline that entails breaking down difficult ideas into much simpler chunks so that others can understand is excellent.
Although everyone may write, it's crucial for technical writers to make their writing easy to read and understand for their audience.
There are different types of technical writing it can be user guides, manuals, software manuals, it can be for educational material. The end goal of technical writing is to explain a complex topic to be easily understood or followed by people
There are so many benefits when it comes to technical writing and these are the benefits our guest speakers experienced:
The writing process is the series of actions taken by writers to produce a finished work and each of our guests has similar processes they follow, but each of them in their own way:
Yuri Research, think of the audience if you don’t know what you are writing about, and organise the layout of the draft that you want to do, making it accessible to everyone.
Bonnie Topic to write about, Brainstorming. Research, look to people who’ve written about the topic and read through the topics from other articles to understand the topic well. Print an outline, the skeleton of the article, and break them in a step-by-step way, it's easier when you have an outline. Send draft and wait for approval from the client, make readers know what the problem is and how it will benefit them if they read the article, editing. Make use of Grammarly and other tools, review and then it is good for publishing
Kolade Even if I know what I am writing about, I still do research. The takeaway, research, check if my article is opinionated or not.
Savvas Cater for the audience, simplify and use simple language for your audience.
Emy Know who you are writing for, and have the goal to reach out to everyone. Like who is going to be reading your article, write the language you are going to understand. Tools like Grammarly and Hemingway help structure your sentences, but you have to know how as a writer to structure your idea without those tools.
A simple definition of what a niche is is a specialized segment of the market for a particular kind of product or service. meaning, it is something that one or more people can identify you with because you are highly skilled at it. Now, is having a niche important for you as a technical writer? How do you discover your niche?
Graham Write to newbies, write to seniors. Choose who you want to write for.
Yuri How to find a niche, write about general things. You don’t have to force it, you will discover that you like to write about a specific thing and that will become your niche.
You can start with Write For the Community programme we have here at Strapi.
Anyone with any level of experience with Strapi is more than welcome to start writing for us. You don’t have to be an experienced technical writer. What matters is that your knowledge will be more than enough to help the Strapi community or those interested in learning about Strapi.
Other than that, our guests also have shared what else you can do to begin your journey in technical writing:
Kolade Start with Hashnode, and then start writing for FreeCodeCamp because you get to work with editors who will edit your articles and who will help you with how you can improve. So you will get experience from experienced writers. When you have articles to present, you can apply to FreeCodeCamp
Savvas Even tweets and Twitter threads, cutting articles into small chunks, is a nice way to start.
Bonnie Check google dev docs on how to write your articles. Document your projects and write them in a way that if someone wants to build a similar project as yours, they can follow along and use it. Use dev.to and hashnode.com and other writing platforms. Writing is like building a CV because recruiters see what you are putting out there.
Emy If you understand something well, write about it. If you continue to be consistent, people will notice and discover you and that is how opportunities come to you. One of the people who worked there can see your work and approach you for work. You can apply to write at LogRocket as well.
Yuri Hashnode.com and medium.com helps you push your content forward. But most importantly, consistency.
There are so many great resources to learn about technical writing. Such as Emy’s article about “Starting Out With Technical Writing”, Yuri’s curated list of technical writing resources and Bonnie’s own book and resources to technical writing and Daniel’s GitHub repo which contains lists of paid technical resources.
With practice comes perfection. The only way to be a great technical writer is to write more. The more you write, the more you learn and get better. Once you are comfortable writing for the Write For the Community program at Strapi, you may also venture into contributing to making our documentation better.
Technical Writer, Tech Blogger, Developer Advocate Intern, Self-Taught Frontend Developer.