A Career in Technical Writing?
(Excerpts) Ever thought about what goes into creating the user manuals or instruction brochures of your music system, mobile phones or even the car maintenance guides? Most of us just manage to glance through the item, leave alone going into the technical details. Since such information is meant for the layman, simplifying the jargons associated…
Read MoreHow to Write Technical Documents for the Intended Audience
There is no such thing as a single “user guide” or “product manual” in technical documentation. It all depends on the audience you are writing for and their specific interests. For example, imagine you are writing a “software manual” for software that audits medical insurance claims. Here are the interests of different groups of readers…
Read MoreHow to Transform Long Paragraphs into Easy-to-Understand Tables
© 2010 Ugur Akinci There are those cases when the best way to make a long and complicated paragraph understandable is to transform it into a table. Here is an example. First the paragraph: “In those cases when there is low load on the circuit (that is, less than 10 watts), the user should turn…
Read MoreTechnical Book Review – "Guide to Technical Editing" by Anne Eisenberg
Guide to Technical Editing by Anne Eisenberg is a book outdated in some regards (printed in 1992) but the principles of editing covered in this 182-page volume are well established, still valid, and richly illustrated. For example, the illustration of a “rocket” on page 88 is one such visual element that clearly betrays the pre-Internet…
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