Hi, just landed myself a 12 month Technical Author contract to improve a company's efficiency at producing documents for their products,
anyone working/worked as a technical author? any advice or reading up I can do? what are the prospects like? I did a bit of research and it could involve some programming which I have no experience in, but the main point of the project is to improve and standardise their documentation process,
You already got the job? And now your on the Internet asking how to do it?
Good blag.
1. Write youself a style guide if the company doesn't already have one - e.g. I work in pharmaceuticals & there are a whole load of ways of talking about dosing (IV, i.v., [i]iv[/i], iv, intravenous). Wikipedia explains it some more http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Style_guide
2. Make some templates so it's easy to be consistent with headings
3. Learn how to make tables of contents
4. Make friends with someone to proof-read what you write. It can be really hard to spot your own mistakes
Good luck!
Consistency, clarity, brevity, transparency, simple language. If you start to admire your own language, you're probably doing it wrong. Agree on the style guide stuff and some simple, elegant templates. But focus on banging out strong, useful content, not the tools. Some technical authors are mentalists, don't be one of them. Good luck 🙂
+1 jam bo
I would rather say "Plus One Jam Bo" 🙂
I did a stint as a technical author a few year back and it wasn’t for me, I found it very monotonous; maybe it was the subject matter repair/overhaul manuals for aircraft parts.
However, +1 for
Consistency, clarity, brevity, transparency, simple language
I dunno.
I work as a medical writer in the pharmaceutical industry.
I spend a lot of time playing with styles so definitely get your head round them. Word just accumulates styles within a document so being able to control that is a must. Recent versions of Word are a lot more consistent in this area but I also miss 2003 where you could go into the vba and rewrite the code for formatting!.
I also use a lot of macros. And Ask fields for autofilling forms.
And I spent last week converting UK spelling to US. I can't spell in either now!
More here: http://word.mvps.org/
You appear to end your paragraphs with a comma.
+1 for what Jambo said.