The Why, Who, and How of Tech Writing
Tech writing is fundamentally about helping people understand concepts that are potentially complex or new to them. To do this effectively, before you start putting fingers to keys, you need to start by asking three key questions about your subject and the audience(s) for it. After doing this, later and more in-depth parts of the process will become clearer and easier. There are more audiences for your words than you might think, and different audiences have different expectations and needs from documentation. Understanding these will save you hours of work and countless frustrations later. Finally, to help you through those frustrating times, I hope to help you understand how important good tech writing is and what a crucial role you play, whatever the nature of your work is.
This chapter covers the following main topics:
- Why tech writing is important
- What documentarians can accomplish
- How to understand who you are writing for
