Technical Writing

The book I read to research this post was Technical Writing For Dummies by Sheryl Lindsell-Roberts which is a very good book which I bought from kindle. I think this is quite an old book because in the part about internet browsers she says the main 2 are internet explorer and netscape communicator. As you probably know netscape hasn’t been around for a while. This book covers its subject quite well and there is sections on writing online in either internet or network. It does also cover writing how to manuals as well as magazine articles and also giving talks. One thing it does say is you have to understand what you’re writing about but you don’t need to about every aspect of the subject you’re writing. A lot of people who do technical writing know nothing about something and have to interview the people who have worked on it and obviously just stick to what he is writing about. It’s important that a layperson can understand what you’re writing and a lot of people do technical writing in a complex way which let’s face it you can’t assume your audience is knowledgeable about the subject. This is especially important when you’re writing a how to guide for a product. If you are doing a guide like that you must write out the steps then work out how you are going to incorporate it into your writing. You should also include a bit on troubleshooting for if they have any problems. If you’re writing a magazine article you write out the important points like the advantages and disadvantages of something then work out what you are going to write in your article. Finally an example of point I want to make is there are 31 million pages in the data documents for a Boeing 747 but nobody needs to read all that thankfully and give everyone who works on it a manual Boeing have it all online and people look at what they need to know.