Clear Technical Writing

Every complex product needs to be explained to its users, and technical writers, also known as technical communicators, are the ones who do that job. A growing field, technical writing requires multiple skills, including an understanding of technology, writing ability, and great people skills. Whether you're thinking of becoming a technical writer, just starting out, or you've been working for a while and feel the need to take your skills to the next level, The Insider's Guide to Technical Writing can help you be a successful technical writer and build a satisfying career. Inside the Book Is This Job for Me? What does it take to be a technical writer? Building the Foundation: What skills and tools do you need to get started? The Best Laid Plans: How do you create a schedule that won’t make you go crazy? How do you manage different development processes, including Agile methodologies? On the Job: What does it take to walk into a job and be productive right away? The Tech Writer Toolkit: How do you create style guides, indexes, templates and layouts? How do you manage localization and translation and all the other non-writing parts of the job? I Love My Job: How do you handle the ups and downs of being a technical writer? Appendixes: References to websites, books, and other resources to keep you learning. Index

Engineers and scientists of all types are often required to write reports, summaries, manuals, guides, and so forth. While these individuals certainly have had some sort of English or writing course, it is less likely that they have had any instruction in the special requirements of technical writing. Filling this void, Technical Writing: A Practical Guide for Engineers and Scientists enables readers to write, edit, and publish materials of a technical nature, including books, articles, reports, and electronic media. Written by a renowned engineer and widely published technical author, this guide complements the traditional writer’s reference manuals and other books on technical writing. It helps readers understand the practical considerations in writing technical content. Drawing on his own work, the author presents many first-hand examples of writing, editing, and publishing technical materials. These examples illustrate how a publication originated as well as various challenges and solutions.

A complete and friendly guide to technical writing! Let’s face it, a lot of technical documentation reads as if it had been translated into English from Venutian by a native speaker of gibberish. Which is annoying for you and expensive for the manufacturer who pays with alienated customers and soaring technical support costs. That’s why good technical writers are in such big demand worldwide. Now, Technical Writing For Dummies arms you with the skills you need to cash in on that demand. Whether you’re contemplating a career as a technical writer, or you just got tapped for a technical writing project, this friendly guide is your ticket to getting your tech writing skills up to snuff. It shows you step-by-step how to: Research and organize information for your documents Plan your project in a technical brief Fine-tune and polish your writing Work collaboratively with your reviewers Create great user manuals, awesome abstracts, and more Write first-rate electronic documentation Write computer- and Web-based training courses Discover how to write energized technical documents that have the impact you want on your readers. Wordsmith Sheryl Lindsell-Roberts covers all the bases, including: All about the red-hot market for technical writing and how to get work as a technical writer The ABCs of creating a strong technical document, including preparing a production schedule, brainstorming, outlining, drafting, editing, rewriting, testing, presentation, and more Types of technical documents, including user manuals, abstracts, spec sheets, evaluation forms and questionnaires, executive summaries, and presentations Writing for the Internet—covers doing research online, creating multimedia documents, developing computer-based training and Web-based training, and writing online help Combining examples, practical advice, and priceless insider tips on how to write whiz-bang technical documents, Technical Writing For Dummies is an indispensable resource for newcomers to technical writing and pros looking for new ideas to advance their careers.

Helps both engineers and students improve their writing skills by learning to analyze target audience, tone, and purpose in order to effectively write technical documents This book introduces students and practicing engineers to all the components of writing in the workplace. It teaches readers how considerations of audience and purpose govern the structure of their documents within particular work settings. The IEEE Guide to Writing in the Engineering and Technical Fields is broken up into two sections: “Writing in Engineering Organizations” and “What Can You Do With Writing?” The first section helps readers approach their writing in a logical and persuasive way as well as analyze their purpose for writing. The second section demonstrates how to distinguish rhetorical situations and the generic forms to inform, train, persuade, and collaborate. The emergence of the global workplace has brought with it an increasingly important role for effective technical communication. Engineers more often need to work in cross-functional teams with people in different disciplines, in different countries, and in different parts of the world. Engineers must know how to communicate in a rapidly evolving global environment, as both practitioners of global English and developers of technical documents. Effective communication is critical in these settings. The IEEE Guide to Writing in the Engineering and Technical Fields Addresses the increasing demand for technical writing courses geared toward engineers Allows readers to perfect their writing skills in order to present knowledge and ideas to clients, government, and general public Covers topics most important to the working engineer, and includes sample documents Includes a companion website that offers engineering documents based on real projects The IEEE Guide to Engineering Communication is a handbook developed specifically for engineers and engineering students. Using an argumentation framework, the handbook presents information about forms of engineering communication in a clear and accessible format. This book introduces both forms that are characteristic of the engineering workplace and principles of logic and rhetoric that underlie these forms. As a result, students and practicing engineers can improve their writing in any situation they encounter, because they can use these principles to analyze audience, purpose, tone, and form.

If you can write clear, concise instructions, then you can be a technical writer. Learn, step-by-step, how to turn your creative writing talent into a highly lucrative career, where you get paid big money consistently to use your writing skills.

The revised and enlarged third edition of Zinsser's trusted writing guide covers the principles of good writing while including information on technical, business and sports writing, humor, interviews, working with a word processor, sexism, and a writer's attitudes toward language and craft.

This book is intended for anyone whose job involves writing formal documentation. It is aimed at non-native speakers of English, but should also be of use for native speakers who have no training in technical writing. Technical writing is a skill that you can learn and this book outlines some simple ideas for writing clear documentation that will reflect well on your company, its image and its brand. The book has four parts: Structure and Content: Through examples, you will learn best practices in writing the various sections of a manual and what content to include. Clear Unambiguous English: You will learn how to write short clear sentences and paragraphs whose meaning will be immediately clear to the reader. Layout and Order Information: Here you will find guidelines on style issues, e.g., headings, bullets, punctuation and capitalization. Typical Grammar and Vocabulary Mistakes: This section is divided alphabetically and covers grammatical and vocabulary issues that are typical of user manuals.