Technical writing is so important that in a better world, the people who do it would all sit on solid gold thrones being fed grapes by their grateful colleagues.
I’m only half joking. Technical writing is what saves companies from terrible mistakes and operational inefficiencies, from irate employees and confused customers. And it’s something we only tend to notice when it goes wrong.
One of my favourite examples of that involved a spaceship. The full story is in Chapter 12, but the short version is that a simple technical writing error meant that the two teams making a $125 million Mars orbiter for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) used different measurements. Nobody spotted the mistake until the probe messed up its atmospheric burn and headed straight for the sun.
Most technical writing isn’t that dramatic, but it can still make an incredible difference to a business. It can make the rollout of a new information technology (IT) system so much smoother. It can make trainers’ lives better and their training more useful. It can translate the most complex concepts and express them in the best way for any audience.
Technical writing gets the right information to the right people in the right way. And this book explains how to do that – not just in printed material but in online text and multimedia too.
In Chapter 1 I’ll explain what technical writing is and why the most important tool isn’t a really good pen or keyboard.
In Chapter 2 we’ll step through the key stages of technical writing from setting the specification to revision and archiving. We’ll also discuss the importance of separating style from content.
If you don’t know who you’re writing for, you shouldn’t start writing yet. Chapter 3 explains why.
Chapter 4 shows you how to break down even the most forbidding project into bite-size chunks, and why that’s good for you and for your readers.
Chapter 5 looks at the dangers of assuming things, such as readers’ expertise or knowledge.
In Chapter 6 we’ll look at the importance of precision and the best ways to vanquish vagueness.
I love humour, but as we’ll discover in Chapter 7, it’s best avoided in technical documents.
In Chapter 8 we’ll take inspiration from coding and optimise our text to do more with less.
Chapter 9 shows how weak and woolly writing can make even the best content boring.
In Chapter 10 we’ll look at visual ways to present information and break up large blocks of text.
In Chapter 11 we’ll identify the ways in which editing can make good writing great, and the traps technical writers sometimes fall into.
And in Chapter 12 we’ll explore the technical writing house of horrors: the commas, letters and basic errors that have destroyed spaceships and historic businesses alike.
Let’s get to work.