A free online textbook on technical writing

Over the years, I have received hundreds of phone calls and e-mails (not to mention personal enquiries), asking me how one can become a technical writer. I do not know what is the attraction for becoming a technical writer. I do not know whether people feel that just anyone can become a technical writer. Whether they think technical writers are paid very well. Or whether there is a great shortage of technical writers and that anyone who claims to be a technical writer can get a job or a contract as a technical writer.

I have answered all these enquiries in several ways. Many times, I have sent such individuals FAQs. Some times, I have recommended them to books, sites and mailing lists. A few times, I have organised seminars and tried to promote technical writing. In return, I have built a tremendous amount of goodwill. Hopefully, I have been successful in creating a few technical writers. I feel very good when senior writers (no, not those with grey hair—but those recognised for their grey matter) say that they have come into this profession because of me.

I am sure there are hundreds more waiting to join this profession. I have just two words of advice for them—Do it! How do you become a writer? One word of advice—Write! Where can you find the knowledge and information to become a technical writer? The Internet!

Online textbook
Some of the best things in life are free. There is one such “course” on the Internet for technical writing. The address for the textbook is www.io.com/~hcexres/tcm1603/acchtml/acctoc.html. Just download the lessons, study them, and begin writing. You are well on your way to becoming a technical writer. I applaud David McMurrey for sharing such wonderful material with the world.

While this course is mainly intended for the newbie technical writer, those in technical writing jobs may also benefit from some of the pages and ideas. Established technical writers may find it useful to browse through the pages and discover how they have jumped to the topmost rung of the ladder, while skipping many preliminary steps. I have merely glanced through the contents, as I have not had the time to really study technical writing. (I have been too busy promoting it!)

The online course and textbook covers five broad areas:

• Introduction
• Examples, Cases and Models
• Applications of Technical Writing
• Document Design
• Processes and Guideline in Technical Writing.

David has an exhaustive set of examples—from applications to proposals to progress reports. Studying these examples would be an education by itself.

Examples
Of course, I do remember that you all want to become hard-core technical writers. You want to write user manuals, create help files, and work with system documentation. If you go to any Information Technology library, you will find hundreds of good samples of user manuals. If you work with good software—Word, PageMaker, Adobe Acrobat, Oracle, Java, Visual Basic, Internet Explorer—you can see excellent examples of good technical writing in the user manuals and in the help files. The Internet is a gold mine of excellence in technical writing. Of course, you need to separate the wheat from the chaff. For every good site, there are 99 other average sites. The tragedy is that many Web designers feel that including Flash files or heavy multimedia elements make for a good site. However, if you are a good technical writer, you will be able to judge for yourself the sites that work and the sites that fail.

Work samples
One of the simplest exercises that I give to my “students” is to take a task or function in MS Word and write a page or two on it. Basically, create user instructions for that task or function. How about creating a user manual for the Spell Check function? If you want a challenging one, then create one for Mail Merge! How about writing about Using the Toolbar? You can hone your writing skills by doing such exercises. With these work samples, you can go and look for jobs and contracts in technical writing.

Here again you will be given some written tests. If you have done enough writing, then these tests will not be difficult. If you have not written at least a thousand pages in your life, then you will definitely fail in the test.

How did I become a successful technical writer? I started with an advantage—I was a writer from an early age. I worked as a freelance journalist for several years and wrote hundreds of articles. This was sufficient training for writing. Then I obtained a diploma in journalism and followed it with a diploma in book publishing. These have stood me in good stead. You too can take the journalism route to technical writing.

(Gurudutt Kamath is a technical writer based in Mumbai. Feedback on the column may be sent to documentor@vsnl.com but the author regrets his inability to respond to mail soliciting jobs, training, personal advice, etc.)