Introduction

Sometimes it may be beyond a companies or individuals budget to hire a professional writer to address their technical documentation. Although in an ideal world all technical documentation should be produced by a highly trained expert, unfortunately we do not live in an ideal. In the same way that many people will attempt to repair their own home appliances, many people will attempt to write quality technical documents. Just as fiddling with a toaster can result in electrocution, attempting to write technical documents from scratch without prior advice will ultimately result in failure. As a rough rule of thumb you should always seek to employ a specialist, but if for whatever reason you can't and you are the poor unfortunate that has had documentation duties foisted on them, don't despair. This brief guide outlines some of the core skills you will need to bring to your writing, technical conventions to be aware of, software packages you can consider, and definite things to avoid. Hopefully even if you have never written a sentence in your life about anything vaguely technical you will have at the very least, a broader picture of what technical writing entails.

What is Technical Writing?

Technical writing unsurprisingly enough, refers to writing that is technical. Although this may seem like a fallacious definition, it's an important one to remember. Too many technical authors make the mistake of creating documentation that is either too technical, or too 'literary'. A good technical author should be able to adjust the balance between the two to suit the end user of the documentation. Technical writing is a lot like fresh air, pervasive and yet pretty much invisible. In the weird wired world in which we find ourselves, technical writing is everywhere. Software manuals, user guides for home appliances, instructional leaflets, emails, letters, reports, technical news reports, statistics and biographies on television sports shows all are examples of technical writing to which people are exposed to on a daily basis. If you have ever tried to program the time settings on a home video recorder and flung the manual across the room in disgust, you threw a piece of technical writing (although obviously not a very good one!).

Too many times technical literature is produced by writers with not a large enough grasp of technology, or technologists that lack an ability to write. As a prospective technical author you must tread the very delicate line of being technically knowledgeable in your specialist field(s) as well as being a 'good' writer (as opposed to 'bad' writers who can usually be found mugging sweet old ladies or something). Technical documentation is usually produced for two distinct user groups, namely expert level users, and naive users. As a technical author one of your first tasks is to sort out what audience you are writing for, which brings me deftly to:

Know thy foe

As the old clich