Tech Writer Today Magazine - TechWhirl
Technical writing and technical communications news, articles and resources for technical writers and technical communicators.
While for some the choice to become a technical writer is obvious, the industry one chooses to work in is just as important as the initial decision to become a technical writer. If you are about to head out with newly minted degree in hand, or looking for a new opportunity, finding out where the jobs are in technical writing and other tech comm fields marks one of the biggest steps you can take. Continue reading ...
Like most thinking about the leap to fulltime freelancing, I had the dream of working at the local coffee shop sipping hot chocolate and working hard on the latest software documentation. My phone would ring with a new client that saw my website and just had to have my services. Then I made the plunge into freelancing while caring for my newborn, and had to wake up from that lovely dream. Continue reading ...
Back when I was taking my technical writing certificate at Seneca College in Toronto, one of my professors spent three hours chatting with us about what it’s like being a freelance technical writer. She laughed a lot about the highs and lows, but a few things she said jolted me out of my assumptions and made me sit up and pay attention. One of them was that she would take literally any job that had anything remotely to do with editing, writing, or teaching. Or websites. Or technology. Or people. Or extreme ironing. Let me share what else I’ve learned as I’ve transitioned from student to full-time employee to part-time consultant to full-time consultant over the last eight years, while balancing three houses, two cities, one wedding, and two kids. Continue reading ...
Not many of us started off here. Although it seems that the field has been growing steadily for twenty years, there haven’t historically been a lot of technical writing programs, and thus most technical writers began their professional lives as…something else. Of the technical writers I heard from, only four had been through a dedicated [...] Continue reading ...
Here are two questions to ask yourself: 1) when are you most content? (Not ‘happy’ per se, since happy moments are fleeting. 2) Does contentment ever happen for you during the workday? The average American worker spends 2080 hours per year on paid work. Over 30 years, that adds up to 62,400 hours. That’s a [...] Continue reading ...
I entered this career using a combination of persistence and dumb luck. I wanted to become a tech writer when I was in college, but the career ladder didn’t exist then as it does now. My parents cautioned me not to pursue it. They didn’t understand that one could make a living by writing instructions. [...] Continue reading ...
If you’ve been documenting software for any length of time, and if you still wander into bookstores, perhaps you’ve gazed wistfully at the shelf of books covering some of the tools and packages you use every day. As you page through the text, you think to yourself “There’s certainly not much here that I don’t [...] Continue reading ...
Editor’s Note: The following piece, by the late, great Herman Holtz, was to appear as part of Herman’s “Hindsights & Insights” column. It is part of our collection of “classics”–articles that stand the test of time no matter how many technologies come and go. Published with permission. It seems, from what I read every day [...] Continue reading ...
To many aspiring novelists, poets and journalists, working as a technical writer seems like the perfect stepping stone to their dreams. After all, you’ll be paid to put pen to paper–something every wannabe writer dreams of. So what if it isn’t the Great American Novel? You’ll still have time for your own writing in your [...] Continue reading ...