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What is a typical day in the field of Technical Writing?

I am a student at Northlands Job Corps trying to figure out a possible career in Technical Writing #job #career

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Dexter’s Answer

Hi Brandy,

I'm not in the technical writing field, but I did help write an article about what it's like, so I hope I don't butcher this answer.

Everyone assumes that technical writing is this super dry and boring job where you're just writing up specifications that no one reads, but the technical writers I spoke to say that it is not true!

The role that the tech writers actually play is that of a detective. It's their job to go investigate bugs, features, and products, and then to write up their learnings so that our customers can find help and resolve them by themselves. The toughest part of their job is not the investigation part but in juggling the people relationships. You see because their role touches so many things, they need good relationships with all different types of people inside the company—developers, field folks, etc—so that they can effectively figure out how to help our customers.

So, I would ask, if you're interested in pursuing technical writing, are you someone that can get along with others well? Are you someone that wants to be a technical detective?

I wish you the best of luck! Let me know if I can help clarify my answer!

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Dexter
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Katie’s Answer

My typical day as a a writing intern and technical and procedure writer in the financial industry involved: meetings with subject matter experts to discuss and define processes, writing new documentation, editing old documentation, testing resources to ensure accuracy, responding to questions regarding documentation and simplifying resources to increase usability.
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David’s Answer

While I am not a technical writer, I have worked with them throughout my career and have watched the role evolve. As you know, you will need excellent writing skills but it also requires the ability to translate detailed engineering or scientific information into clear and understandable documentation. Tech writers now usually work with a team of experts and have to be good at asking follow up questions and advising on how to clarify wording. This is a highly valued roles and continues to grow in importance.
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Subathra’s Answer

I am a technical writer. As all other fields have a lifecycle, technical writing also has a lifecycle. DDLC (Document Development Life Cycle).

Project Start-up
Requirement Analysis
Designing
Developing
Testing
Publishing
Maintaining

We work in alignment with this lifecycle. The process involves doc plan (finalizing reviews and publishing date), gathering requirements from SMEs to update or create the doc, preparing the document, sending those to SMEs for reviews, Incorporating SMEs comments, getting approval/signoff/getting the docs verified by the feature leads/appropriate management, publishing the documents, and maintaining it as and when the changes get implemented in the features.

So my typical day involves any one of the tasks that I have mentioned above according to the doc plan. Hope it helps!
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Jane’s Answer

Hi Brandy, I am a technical writer. I love it, and really recommend it as a career. My typical day involves:
-Meeting with developers and business analysts to learning about new products and features our company is developing.
-Writing copy that go into our software as buttons, labels or error messages.
-Writing release notes and user guides which explain clearly and concisely how to use our software.
-Editing my colleagues' work.
I hope that helps!
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