| September 2007 |
| By Hilton Keith |
My title is Senior Technical Writer. I’ve been telling people what to do and how to do it for 13 years now (more on that later). The salary varies dramatically depending on where you live, the size of your company, your experience, and the scope of your responsibilities. Check with the premier professional association for folks of my ilk, the Society of Technical Communication (STC) to set your salary expectations.
The term “writer” is misleading; writing is probably the least time-consuming duty of my daily routine. I spend most of my time trying to influence others: to cough up information, to review documents, to attend meetings, to share software builds and hardware prototypes. Technical writing projects used to generally consist of user manuals, installation guides, online help, getting started guides, and quick reference sheets for hardware and software. Now, we may build websites, white papers, instructional materials destined both for classroom and web-based training, detailed project plans, marketing collateral, functional specifications, test plans, use cases, simulations, video, scripts, animations, 3D models, illustrations, every kind of presentation for every kind of media. We must organize, clarify, edit, and sometimes translate all materials. We often further cross the line into quality control, training, project management, and/or business analysis.
A Technical Communicator (the new preferred term for Tech Writer) presents information to specific audiences for specific purposes. Your audience may be your company’s customer, an internal client service representative, a sales call, developers or auditors, or management. You may tell a customer how to use new features in software, or you may provide them with detailed technical data about a piece of hardware. You may publish a white paper to introduce the public to your industry by explaining what the product is and why they want/need it.
You use your creativity to present complexity in a simple or memorable way. For instance, a company has a list of software back-end system messages that is 40 printed pages! (For the record, that’s a lot of messages.) Training only has a day to explain the whole system, and messages alone would take two days. You suggest this: tape together all the pages and roll them into a scroll before class. During class, unfurl the scroll dramatically! Rather than spending the time to explain every last obscure message, detail the five most common (much to the relief of the class participants).
Industry-specific knowledge is not necessarily the most important qualification for the job; after all, the less you know, the more basic the questions you must ask. Technical gurus often assume you already have a great deal of knowledge- because they do! You must be humble and ask questions whose answers seem obvious, so another job qualification for you is to have a very thick skin. You must be able to ask the right questions, at the right time, of the right people. Have a flexible, open mind and be willing to insist on resolution when there is a conflict. You must be able to convince engineers to review raw documentation, as well as sign off on almost-final product. They frequently view you as a pest- so learn to bake cupcakes, get the boss to sponsor lunch during meetings, tell them jokes, or sing songs- do anything to inspire cooperation and good will!
Technical documentation typically adheres to a strict set of standards; if you are a stickler for details and ready to fight for semantics, then this is the field for you. You must use excellent grammar and have an ear for tone. You must be comfortable and competent with templates and logical information flow. You most likely will have or be expected to build corporate templates for Word, FrameMaker, and CSS. You may be called upon to use a power point template to build presentations. You frequently answer questions from people in the office about common word processing and presentation software, especially when there is a new release of, say, Microsoft Office.
You frequently hear this statement: “Can you just reformat this [nightmare of a mess written by someone who has no idea how to use Word- or words- properly] into a customer-facing doc?” Beware of anyone who nonchalantly says, “Can’t you just [x]?” This is a clear signal that they have no idea what kind of effort goes into your work (xref “thick skin”, above).
Overall, it is a rewarding and satisfying field. You have broad exposure to people at every level of the corporate hierarchy. You build a finished product that you can usually print and hold in your hand. At cocktail parties, you can honestly say, “I’m a published writer!” and watch their delight as people realize they are in the company of greatness.
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