Got a couple more to add (thanks Dawn for #3!)- please do contribute! You know you’re a technical writer… … when you feel emotional and/or physical pain at the sight of an out-of-place apostrophe. … if, when faced with an engineer asking you questions about a product you document, you say in a tired or [...]

I’m pretty busy with my new job this week, so this is just a quick post – but hopefully a fun one. I wanted to write a You know you’re a technical writer… list, but I’m low on innovation and humour at the moment. So, I’m going to start the list, and I want you [...]

I’ve mentioned before (particularly in How to Write a How To) that when writing technical documentation, it’s important to keep a number of things about it as consistent as possible. In this post, I want to elaborate on some of the different areas in which consistency is important. But first of all, why is consistency [...]

I’ve mentioned before that to do their job, a technical writer these days needs to know their way around quite a few software tools. Here’s a round-up of some of the more common ones used for authoring and publishing documents and online help. Disclaimer: there are plenty of other software applications out there (including on [...]

Technical documents can be loosely divided into two types: the informational and the procedural. Each has its place, but I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that a nicely numbered How To procedure can be far more useful for a reader who just wants to know how to get something done and doesn’t necessarily [...]

There are several ways of presenting information in technical documents – this article covers what I consider to be some of the main types. For convenience, I’m going to use the term product to describe what a document is about, and the term topic to mean a small, discreet part of a document that starts with [...]