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Thursday, August 04, 2005


Tech Writing Advice

I'll get more into this at a later date. Suffice to say, I'm working on a few things. This advice was given to me from Rick Gebhardt.

It's actually weird how I got into tech writing. I started out as a
computer science major in college and even interned as a developer.
Once I graduated the tech bubble had burst and jobs were hard to come
by so I went back to school for my philosophy degree. I used that to
leverage a position as a tech writer at a software firm since I had
the tech savvy already, but was somewhat unproven in writing.

There's not much you can really do to prepare for tech writing other
than doing lots of writing. I would suggest that if you have no
experience attempt to join an open source software initiative and
volunteer to do documentation work. Maybe volunteer for an
organization that has documentation needs. Anything to show that
you've done writing and that you have done writing other than simply
creative writing. Thankfully my philosophy degree forced me to do a
LOT of professionally styled essay writing which was easily
transferable into "real world" technical writing.

I've recently been promoted out of my tech writing role and am now
operating as the lead business analyst for one of our software
projects, but I still have lots of technical styled writing to do.
Tech writing is a good profession to start in, but I don't think I
would have wanted to stick with it for more than a couple of years at
most since it does become repetitive and there isn't a ton of room for
advancement. It will help you to develop essential skills you will
need in other areas of business, however.

I wish you luck in your tech writing aspirations!

Rick

-posted by Nobius 2:34 PM #
Comments: "
Good luck on your quest! Hope I helped a little.


FYI, the link to me is broken :-)
 
" "
Rick

Thanks you did help, I appreciate your time. I'll let you know how it goes. I have a few things I am working on, and technical writing will be involved. I'll tell you more soon.

The link is fixed. Sticky fingers.

-N
 
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